still alive who recollect that the tendency towards active law-reform which was part of the great movement associated with the Reform Act of 1832, first showed itself in an energetic resuscitation of strictness in pleading, so that for many years the practical questions at issue were altogether thrown into obscurity by questions of the proper mode of stating them to the Courts. It was the very state of things which existed when the ancient Hundred Courts of the Germans were administering the rude Salic law. The effects of the 'New Rules of Pleading' wore away very slowly, and it was only the other day that the Judicature Acts, of which the full influence has not yet been felt, placed the Procedure of Courts of Justice on the footing which would naturally be given to it by a society which regards it only as Adjective Law. The most modern classifiers, again, distribute law not with reference to the distinction between Persons and Things, but with reference to the differences between kinds of Rights. I stated before that the clear conception of a legal right is not ancient, or even Roman, but that it belongs distinctively to the modern world. Doubtless, before it can be realised, the sense of a Court of Justice as ever active, and as dominating the whole field of law, must have somewhat decayed. As regards one great class of Rights, those arising out of Contract and Delict, the Romans un questionably mixed together the notions of legal Right and legal Duty. They considered the parties as bound together by a vinculum juris, a bond or chain of law, and 'Obligation,' which is the name for this chain, signified rights as well as duties; the right, for example, to have a debt paid as well as the duty of paying it. As I have said elsewhere, 'the Romans kept, in fact, the entire picture of the "legal chain" before their eyes, and regarded one end of it no more and no less than the other.' But it was the Court of Justice which had welded this chain, and the explanation of this and other blended ideas which we can detect in Roman legal phraseology is, I presume, that the dominancy of the Court of Justice over all legal notions still continued to influence the Roman view of law. Although, however, the authors of the Roman Institutional manuals did not invent, and could not have invented, arrangements of law based on classification of Rights, they did, as we have seen, attain to the conception of law as something distinct from Procedure, and they did conceive it as distributable into the Law of Persons and the Law of Things. The exact relation of these two departments to one another has been keenly disputed by modern writers, and it cannot be conveniently considered here; but anybody who can bring home to himself the ancient ideas of law on which I have sought to throw light may, perhaps, convince himself that the conception of a Law of Things, at all events, was a great achievement in mental abstraction; and that it must have been a man of legal genius who first discerned that Law might be thought of and set forth apart from the Courts of Justice which administered it on the one hand, and apart from the classes of persons to whom they administered it on the other. INDEX. ACTIONS ACTIONS, law of, place assigned to it by Roman Jurists, 388, 389 Agnation, system of, among Romans 'Alice in Wonderland' referred to, 35 54 Ancestor-worship, incumbent upon heirs ANCESTOR among Greeks compared with Hindu ANCIENT to funeral rites, 80; intense desire Andaman Islanders, the, account of, Apastamba, Law-Book of, quoted, 13, Aphorisms, as determining dates of an- Aristotle, his view and illustration of Austrian Code, the, referred to, 265 Belgian Constitution, the, referred to, Beneficium, the, stage in the history of Bentham, the jurist, referred to, 351, Bogišic, Professor, his opinions referred Bonitarian Ownership. See Possession, Boulnois and Rattigan, Messrs., their CHANCERY Bracton, his legal treatises referred to, 49 Brahmans, sacred schools of, alluded to, - the, their absolute ascendency, 46; Brahmanical legal authors, priestly Brehon Law Schools, the, referred to, Brehon laws, the, alluded to, 84, 348, British Constitution, the, referred to, Buddha, Buddhism, 30, 31 Bühler, Dr., his preface in Sacred Cation contained in them, 291; rea- YAHIERS, the, neglect of informa- sons for this neglect, 292 et seq.; Callaway, Canon, his observations Capetians, the, Royal House of referred Chancery, English Court of, referred to, |