delivered the opinion of the court.
We do not consider it necessary to enter into a minute investigation of the several propositions presented for consideration in this case, because we are unable to distinguish it in principle from the case of Mahala vs. The State, reported in 10 Yerger, where the question of the power of the courts to discharge a jury in criminal cases has been fully investigated. It is true, in that case the jury was discharged by the court after the testimony had been heard because they said they would not agree upon a verdict, and in the present it was discharged after the bill of indictment had been read because the court thought it was not composed of men who were omni ezceptioni majores; but still we think that the same rules of law which prohibited it in the first case also prohibits it in the last. We deem it unnecessary to en-quire whether the jurors who composed the jury in the present case were good and lawful men under our statutory provisions or not, because, if there were objections to them they were of that kind which are to be classed under the cause of challenge propter defectum, and it is well settled, both by the authorities of the courts of Great Britain and of the State of Tennessee, that it is too late after a jury has been sworn to challenge any of its members propter defectum, to be now a debateable point. But in the present case the court permitted the attorney general, not only after the jury had been sworn but after the prisoner had been put upon his deliverance, to challenge ten of the jurors propter defectum, and set them aside against the prisoner’s consent, and compelled him to select ten others, who, in conjunction with the remaining two, returned the verdict upon which the judgment sought to be reversed was pronounced. That this was an illegal act cannot be controverted; it was error, and such error as cannot be corrected by reversing and remanding the cause for further proceedings, because it will be impossible eve;' to.