was moulded, and from time to time altered, by custom. Until we began to administer Hindu law that law kept pace with the necessities of the time, not by anything in the nature of statute, as nothing of that kind was possible, but by the growth of new customs and by new interpretations put upon the law by the text-writers. Our judges, in their extreme anxiety to administer the law according to the letter of the Shasters, have stereotyped that law, and the decisions forbidding the recognition of any but ancient customs have stopped the growth, which under Hindoo judges would have progressed. The best solution of the difficulty is probably that suggested in the Contemporary Review for May, 1906, by Mr. Justice Nair, of the Madras High Court, namely the establishment of councils in each Presidency for the purpose of suggesting reforms which will accord with the habits and views of the people.

An Elementary Treatise on the Common Law for the Use of Students. BY HENRY T. TERRY. Second Edition. Tokyo: Z. P. Maruya & Co., Lim.; London: Butterworth & Co. 19c6. 4to. vii and 921 pp.+1 leaf (Japanese title-page).

It is extremely difficult to say anything profitable of a book which contains more than eight hundred and fifty quarto pages of text, covers the whole ground of the Common Law, and, having been written for Japanese students, deliberately forbears to cite authorities. By good fortune we know Mr. Terry's work of old, and can certify that it is sound, if he is still the same man. As to the arrangement, the only part of which any one not having an enormous memory for cases can form an adequate judgment, it makes one sad to think how much more intelligible our law would be at this day if Blackstone's had been half as good. We wish Mr. Terry could see his way to bring out a Western edition, furnished with a reasonable and moderate selection of references, on the scale of Kent's Commentaries or thereabouts. Mr. Terry says that a student must take his first book on trust; but, with great respect, this is exactly what we want a student of the Common Law to learn, as soon as possible, not to do. Nevertheless, advanced students in America may well do themselves good with the book as it stands. It could not safely be put in an English learner's hands, as doctrines which prevail in America but not here are sometimes laid down as law without qualification. We must congratulate the Japanese printers (who, by the way, do not use signatures, and make up the sheets, if sheets they are, in some other fashion of their own) on their accurate printing of English.

Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third. Year XIX. Edited and translated by LUKE OWEN PIKE. [Rolls Series.] London: Printed for H.M. Stationery Office. 1906. 8vo. lxxiv and 440 pp. IN the introduction to these unpublished cases of 19 Ed. III, Mr. Pike is, as always, profitable. He shows good cause for thinking that in the fourteenth century villanus still meant a man holding by villein tenure, whether personally free or not if it was to be made clear that he was unfree, the word nativus was added or substituted. There are also some pages tracing the early use and significance of the curious word arraign,

which represents, through a French form, ad rationem ponere, and starts from the idea of calling on the person arraigned to show cause why the Court should not proceed, on what already appears against him, to deal with him as guilty.

At p. 292-3 we find it stated that the so-called statute of Circumspecte agatis was made by the bishops themselves. At p. 328-9 there is an adventurous and unsuccessful attempt to maintain that wager of law does not lie in detinue where the facts are such as to be within the knowledge of the country. At p. 184 Scot C.J. overrules an objection to a verdict being taken after dinner at St. Clement's Church. We can take a verdict by candle-light if the jury will not agree; and if the Court' [of King's Bench] were to move, we could take the jurors about in carts with us, and so Justices of Assize have to do.'

The Law of Lunacy in British India.

By RAMANI KANTA DOSS, Barrister-at-Law, Advocate of the High Court of Judicature, Calcutta. 1906.

THIS will, no doubt, be a most useful little book to the Indian practitioner. It consists of the two Lunacy Acts of 1858 of the Indian Legislature with short commentaries on several of the sections. One of these, Act XXXIV, regulates proceedings in Lunacy in the Courts of Judicature in India established by Royal Charter: the other, Act XXXV, makes provision for the care of the estates of lunatics not subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Courts of Judicature. At the end of the book we find the Indian Lunatic Asylums Act of 1858, being Act XXXVI of 1858, which provides for the reception and detention of lunatics in asylums established for that purpose. These three Acts are the only statutes of the Indian Legislature dealing with the care of the person and property of lunatics in British India, with the exception of two short Acts in 1886 and 1889, which made amendments in the Lunatic Asylums Act. But, as the author points out, a lunatic being as much a member of the community as any other person, he is naturally subject to the common incidents of civil society, and so there are many questions relating to his legal liabilities and privileges, which very often come up before the Law Courts. Thus, for instance, the procedure to be followed in Courts in British India in cases where the accused person is a lunatic has been clearly laid down in certain sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Act V of 1898). These and other analogous questions, such as the criminal responsibility of lunatics, are dealt with in the chapter which treats of Insanity in relation to Crimes. Similarly there are chapters dealing with questions of Succession, Contracts and Torts, Wills and Administration, Limitation, Practice and Procedure, Evidence, and Medical Jurisprudence. These matters are all briefly but lucidly explained.

It is interesting to note the reasons why the case law in India relating to lunatics is comparatively of far less bulk than in England. One reason, no doubt, is that insanity is much less common in India than in Europe. The author points out that 'in India there are only five insane persons for every ten thousand of the population; while in England and Wales the number is thirty-five for the corresponding population, and, as has only recently been pointed out in the Times, insanity has increased fivefold in the last sixty years, during which time the population has only doubled itself.'

This point is even more strongly brought out in the Report of the Census of India, 1901. At page 133 we read, 'In comparison with European countries mental disease would appear to be comparatively rare in India. In England there are about thirteen persons of unsound mind to one in India. That is due partly to the fact that in Europe many persons who suffer from imbecility or from other harmless manifestations of mental disease, or whose attacks are periodical, are included, whereas in India they are not usually taken into consideration; but the main reason is doubtless to be found in the very different conditions of life in the East. In Europe the competition between man and man is severe, and is yearly becoming more so. The mental wear and tear is very great, and the strain on the nervous system deranges many feeble intellects which in the calm and placid East would escape the storms to which they succumb. The total number of insane is less by nearly 11 per cent. than it was in 1891, when a decrease of more than 8 per cent. was registered as compared with 1881. The decline now noticed is common to practically the whole of India.'

:

Possibly one explanation of this contrast is that in India there is no Poor Law. The insane relieved on January 1, 1906, formed 11.7 per cent. of the total pauperism of England and Wales. In India there is no Union where the pauper imbecile can be sent, and the feeling of family life is so strong that harmless imbeciles are taken care of at their homes. This leads to an interesting point, which has an important bearing on the question now under consideration, and that is that by Hindu law the managing member (for instance, a brother) of a joint Hindu family is not bound to take out a certificate under Act XXXV of 1858 in order that he may validly deal with the estate including the lunatic's portion; so that in numerous cases no question regarding the lunatic's person or property comes before the Courts. It is just the same as regards minors in a Hindu joint family the natural and legal guardian is the manager of the joint family. At one time it was held that there was a distinction between lunatics and minors; but this view was subsequently overruled, and it was held that the case of a lunatic is not distinguishable from that of a minor. Reliance was placed on a passage in the Mitákshara which refers explicitly only to minors; but a learned Hindu judge at Calcutta pointed out that the text of Brihaspati, on which that passage is a comment, is quite general in its terms. Mr. Ramani Kanta Doss in the introduction to his little book says that 'ever since the earliest days of ancient civilization the Crown as parens patriae always used to act as guardian of the person and the property of lunatics and idiots. In the eye of the law idiots and lunatics very much resemble the infant, inasmuch as they equally require the protection of the Court, both in respect of their person and property.' That statement is too broad. As Sir William Markby points out, the quaint notion in the English law that the guardianship of every child is vested in the king as parens patriae, and that this guardianship is deputed by him to the relatives of the child, so far as it is not purely fanciful, is probably feudal-or at any rate determined by feudalism, its apparent purpose being to exclude any claim by the immediate lord of the fee-and nothing of this sort is known to the Hindu law. In India, as in other countries where the feudal law has not prevailed, guardianship is closely connected with the customs of the family. The same is true for the lunatic as for the minor.

Psychology applied to Legal Evidence and other constructions of law. By G. F. ARNOLD, I.C.S. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. 1906. 470 pp. and index.. (128. net.)

THE few lines we can devote to this book will be wholly inadequate for the treatment of the subjects through which it ranges, and the more so since, as the author anticipates, there is barely a page in which we are not in sharp antagonism to his views.

The intention' of the book, to use a term that is constantly recurrent in it, is to analyse the nature of evidence and to refer its doctrines to the elementary principles of human nature. The book itself is constructed by a series of discussions on terms or doctrines of law more or less accurately apprehended. The thread which alone connects these discussions is a vigorous polemic against the ignorance, bigotry, blindness, and folly of the legal profession; and the method by which this is demonstrated is mainly to select passages from the works of some of the best known of this baneful class, and by the application of verbal criticism, quite worthy of a clever schoolboy, to extract or to construct paralogisms which are then by another illicit process set down to the account of the profession at large; and this is then held up to the contempt of all educated men who have studied psychology. The book from beginning to end teems with this sort of declamation; and it is only fair to the author, to show that we do not exaggerate, to give two samples, one from his first page, one from his last. A systematic application of psychology to any branch of the law is sufficiently novel to cause them [lawyers] a shock. . . . If there is one path which lawyers and judges fear to tread it is that of philosophy; if there is one region in which they do not feel themselves safe, one atmosphere which they regard as poison it is that of philosophical notions and metaphysical ideas; and psychology, it must be admitted, is but one branch of mental philosophy. Yet such is the irony of the case that, anxious as they are to avoid the discussion of these matters, the subjects with which they deal are perpetually presenting them with problems whose real character is such that they cannot be adequately solved without the aid of philosophy.' The last sentence in the book is: "The failure of the lawyers to appreciate the value of this method [a good general education] is what has contributed so largely to make the law a water-tight compartment cut off from all connexion with the streams of knowledge outside it.'

The General Introduction (1-28) we may perhaps be allowed to term the general indictment on the lines just indicated. Then follow chapters (29-104) on Intention,' Will,' Motive,' and the familiar collection of terms into which legal conceptions are customarily analysed. Mr. Arnold gives no indication that this work has previously been done, with somewhat greater precision and a wider range of philosophical reading, by one. John Austin, to the study of whose work in this connexion we refer Mr. Arnold if he meditates a second edition. We may also direct him to another 'find,' the work of Jeremy Bentham known as the Rationale of Judicial Evidence, and also to his Principles of Morals and Legislation, with both of which treatises our author seems to be unacquainted, and which will be invaluable to him in correcting and supplementing his opinions. and conclusions. But both of these writers were lawyers, and so too was Franciscus de Verulamio, the fifth book of whose De Augmentis Scientiarum or the aphorisms beginning with the thirty-eighth in his Novum Organum, extracted in Mr. Arnold's copious manner, would have clinched the con

clusions he strives to propound in this portion of his book, and which he assumes to be original analyses, with much additional force.

Even Mr. Arnold has his prejudices; and we note that he refrains, though treating on the nature of the mind (pp. 105-59, 217-55) and the theory of causation (pp. 183-216), to quote either Locke or Hume, because in their day psychology as a separate branch of philosophy did not exist' (p. 377), and, possibly for the same reason, he ignores Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; though he makes a great display (pp. 417, 423, 427, 428) of a quotation from Kant which he appears to have discovered as a note to Mr. Bradley's Ethical Studies.

We therefore feel we may do him an injustice by testing him with reference to either Bacon or Bentham or Austin. Let us try him by reference to popular science. In Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology, the catalogue of the weaknesses and prejudices that lie in wait for the human understanding is analysed with a minuteness that would have served Mr. Arnold's purpose well; yet he appears quite ignorant of its existence, though he quotes the same author's Social Statics, a juvenile work, not greatly relevant, and which appeared nearly sixty years ago; but the Psychology, mirabile dictu, is an unknown land. Instead of books of this sort, the staple of Mr. Arnold's repertory consists of books, possibly of great excellence, still of that modernity, perhaps, that they have not yet attained fame. He relies much on an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (ninth edition); and where he does draw from books of world-wide note, he gives us the impression that his acquaintance is only second-hand, through quotations. We have already given one instance of this; Lotze is another (pp. 13, 356), and Plato (p. 418). In short, Mr. Arnold's reading seems lamentably limited when measured by his pretensions, or by those of an average scholar, though a lawyer. We should not have noticed this ordinarily; but when a writer preaches his gospel that knowledge of psychology is the one thing needful and bans to the limbo of ignorance and stupidity the whole profession of the law for that they are lacking therein, a glance at the credentials of the excommunicator is neither unnecessary nor unwholesome.

Mr. Arnold's notions of legal doctrines are, to a lawyer at least, epoch making. He devotes a chapter (pp. 160-80) to 'the Normal Man.' His objection to him is that no such being ever existed or could exist. Incidentally we may note that a great chapter of the history of the human mind, the history of realism, nominalism, and conceptualism is closed to Mr. Arnold, else his difficulties here would be done away. Neither does he seem to know that the normal man' is not a purblind blunder of silly nonpsychological English lawyers, but a creation both of Aristotle, as o póvipos, and of the great Roman jurists as the diligens paterfamilias, or further back still, far before the days when psychology became a separate branch of philosophy,' when Protagoras propounded his Távтov Xpμátov μéтроν аν0ршжоv elva, and that he flourishes most usefully in German, French, and Italian jurisprudence. Mr. Arnold says (p. 174) (1) 'that the normal man has no real existence of any kind' and (2) ' if he does exist, he is not capable of application in the sense claimed, and that attempts to apply the notion have mischievous results.' To the first contention we reply, Agreed; to the second, through lack of space to explain the misconception, we say Solvitur ambulando (for juries do it every day), and point to the normal man's two thousand years of useful existence in the Roman Empire and through Europe and America.

Mr. Arnold also discourses of insanity (pp. 283-308), with much girding at the lawyers; on hallucinations (pp. 331-52), which strangely enough is