fore they are entirely uncertain and arbitrary. On few points are the statements of travelers less vague than on the details of native penal customs. What the Abbé Froyart says of the natives of Loango may be said of all but the lowest tribes: "There is no one ignorant of the cases which incur the pain of death, and of those for which the offender becomes the slave of the person offended."

The laws of the Caffre tribes are said to be a collection of precedents of decisions of bygone chiefs and councils, appealing solely to what was customary in the past, never to the abstract merits of the case. There appears, it is said, to be no uncertainty whatever in their administration, the criminality of different acts being measured exactly by the number of cattle payable in atonement. So the customs reported from Ashantee manifest a sense of the value of fixed penalties. An Ashantee is at liberty to kill his slave,. but is punished if he kills his wife or child; only a chief can sell his wife, or put her to death for infidelity; whilst a great man who kills his equal in rank is generally suffered to die by his own hands. A wife who betrays a secret forfeits her upper lip, an ear if she listens to a private conversation of her husband. The forms of legal procedure manifest no less regularity than the laws themselves.

In Congo, the plaintiff opens the case on his knees to the judge, who sits under a tree, or in a great straw hut built on purpose, holding a staff of authority in his hand. When he has heard the plaintiff's evidence, he hears defendant and witnesses. In default of witnesses the affair is deferred, spies being sent to gather ampler information. and ground for judgment from the talk of the people. In the public trials of Ashantee the accused is always fully heard, and is obliged either to commit or exculpate himself on every point. On the Gold Coast a plaintiff would sometimes defer his suit for thirty years, letting it devolve on his heirs, if the

judges, the caboceros, from interested motives, delayed to grant him a trial, and thus obliged him to wait, in hopes of finding less impartial or else more amenable judges in the future.

Several rules of savage jurisprudence betray curiously different notions of equity from those of more civilized lands. The Abbé Froyart was shocked that, on the complaint of the missionaries to the King of Loango of nocturnal disturbances, round their dwellings, the King should have issued an ordinance making the disturbance of the missionaries repose a capital crime. The reason the natives gave him for thus putting slight offences on an equality with grave ones was, that in proportion to the ease of abstinence from anything forbidden, or of the performance of anything commanded, was the inexcusableness of disobedience, and the deserved severity of punishment. Again, impartiality with regard to rank or wealth, which is now regarded among English speaking people as a self-evident principle of justice, as a primary instinct of equity, is by no means so regarded by savages; for not only is murder often atoned for according to the rank of the murderer as on the Gold Coast or in old Anglo-Saxon law, on the basis, apparently, of the value of his loss in death, but such difference of rank sometimes enters into the estimate of the due punishment for robbery.

Thus the Guinea Coast negroes thought it reasonable to punish rich persons guilty of robbery more severely than the poor, be cause, they said, the rich were not urged to it by necessity, and could better spare the money-fines laid on them. The Caffre law distinguishes broadly and clearly between injuries to a man's person and injury to his property, accounting the former as offences against the chief to whom he belongs, and making such chief sole recipient of all fines, allowing only personal redress where the man's property has been damaged. Thus

Caffre, law divides itself into lines bearing some analogy to those of our criminal and civil law; such offences as treason, murder, assault, and witchcraft entering into the criminal code, and constituting injuries to the actual sufferer's chief; whilst adultery, slander, and other forms of theft, enter, as it were, into the civil law, as injuries for which there are direct personal remedies.

The almost universal test amongst savages of guilt or innocence, where there is a want or conflict of evidence, is the ordeal.

The identity of many ordeals among different peoples, such as that by fire and water, is probably due to the readiness into which such tests would suggest themselves to the imagination. He who, holding fire in his hand, said the Indian law, is not burnt, or who, diving under water, is not soon forced up by it, must be held veracious in his testimony on oath; and the same was the idea in China and Africa, as well as in Europe. That these ordeals were traditionally preserved by the shamans or priests as one of the sources of their power, derives probability from their close analogy to the judicial ordeals invented and administered by the priests of early Europe. As in Europe after the fifteenth century the oath of canonical purgation gradually displaced the older systems of ordeals, so it would seem that in savage life, too, the judicial oath succeeds in order of time the judicial ordeal.

The witness in a modern English law court invoking upon himself divine wrath if he swears falsely by the book he kisses, preserves with curious exactitude the judicial oath of savage times and lands.

To understand the binding force of oaths among savages it is necessary to observe how closely connected they are with savage ideas of fetichism. The hair or food of a man, which a savage burns to rid himself of an enemy, is no mere symbol of that enemy so much as in some sense that enemy himself. The physical act of touching the thing

invoked has reference to feelings of causal connection between things, as in Samoa, where a man to attest his veracity would touch his eyes, to indicate a wish that blindness might strike him if he lied, or would dig a hole in the ground to indicate a wish that he might be buried in the event of falsehood. In Kamschatka, if a thief remains undetected, the elders would summon all the ostrog together, young and old, and forming a circle round the fire, cause certain incantations to be employed. After the incantations the sinews of the back and feet of a wild sheep were thrown into the fire with magical words, and the wish expressed that the hands and feet of the culprit might grow crooked, there being apparently a connection assumed between the action of the fire on the animal's sinews and on the limbs of the man. And in Sweden there are still cunning men who can deprive a real thief of his eye, by cutting a bow and arrows into the representative feature. Perhaps the best illustration of this feeling is in the practice of the Ostiaks, offering their wives, if they suspect them of infidelity, a handful of bear's hairs, believing that, if they touch them and are guilty, they will be bitten by a bear within the space of three days. Among the Nomad races of the north, three kinds of oaths are said to be

common.

Firm, however, as is the savage belief that the consequences of perjury are death or disease, escape from the obligation of an oath is not unknown among savages. On the Guinea Coast recourse was had to the common expedient of priestly absolution, so that when a man took a draught-oath, imprecating death on himself if he failed in his promise, the priests were sometimes compelled to take an oath, too, to the effect that they would not employ their absolving powers to release him. In Abyssinia, a simpler process seems to be in vogue; for the cross, thus addressed his servants: "You see King, on one occasion, having sworn by a

the oath I have taken; I scrape it clean away from my tongue that made it." Thereupon he scraped his tongue, and spat away his oath, thus validly releasing him from it.

In conclusion, I would state that savage

penal laws appear to be as fixed, regular, and well known, as inflexibly bound by precedent, as often improved by the intelligence of individual chiefs as penal laws are in more advanced societies.

D

OWN in Cumberland County, there is an incident, oft related by both lawyers and laymen with great dramatic effect, which concerns the De Vecnion brothers, who, during their lives were at the head of the Maryland bar. When Thomas died, his administrator found his books in a rather confusing condition. One unsettled claim was for a large sum against a client for whom the deceased had labored long and successfully and to the detriment of other business. During the trial to recover payment, the defendant took every opportunity to belittle and scoff at the recognized ability and integrity of the dead lawyer. No attention, however, was paid to him by the other side. Finally, the brother arose to sum up. He related in detail the services of his brother and the estimation in which they were held by the community. At almost every word he was interrupted by the sneers, hisses and scoffing of the heartless defendant. Finally, unable to longer endure the taunts of the dead man's defamer, De Vecnion turned his livid, grief-stained face toward the defendant, and with tears coursing down his cheeks, exclaimed: "Sneer if you will, for the brain that thought for men; the tongue that talked for men; and the hand that wrought for men are now at rest beneath the sod of the valley." De Vecnion sank down overcome with grief. It seemed to those present as if the spirit of the maligned man had come from the earth and solemnly spoke the word.

In Eastern Jersey, the quick-witted exploits of a certain county prosecutor with a mili

tary handle to his name are still told with zest by his professional brethren. One day the General was pursuing his favorite sport, hunting, in season and out of season, but a few miles from his home and had bagged several quail and rabbits when an old and irate farmer came up and demanded the game and damages. The General was willing to pay for the trespassing and for the game but would not release his booty. The farmer then took the General by the shoulder and walked him to the office of a justice of the peace and made a complaint. But to the farmer's horror, his prisoner declared emphatically that he had not been trespassing. He, himself, and none other, was the owner of that farm; and he made a countercharge against the real owner for disorderly conduct. The justice was about to proceed with the hearing when the General declared that since the title to land was in question his court would have no jurisdiction and he must send it up to the court of common pleas. Amazed beyond expression the irate farmer engaged a lawyer and learned that it might cost him five hundred to conduct his suit and that if he did, it would possibly throw a cloud on his title. That anyone should question his title to his own land, worked for fifty years by himself, was a puzzle to the yeoman; and he gladly sought out the General and compromised. Nor was his astonishment the less to find his prisoner the Prosecutor of the Pleas for his county.

THE

HE little court-room at Barry's Corner was crowded to the doors with village folk, and one and all eagerly awaited the calling of the court calendar. The clerk called the case of Hannah Donovan against Timothy McCauley, and both sides answered ready. Lawyer Tim O'Rouke read the pleadings, and in a simple way told the court of the heartlessness of the defendant. Attorney Barney Gilligan for the defendant admitted the promise to marry, but said that he would offer evidence of a justifiable rescission of the contract.

"Hannah Donovan, the plaintiff," testified that she was ready and willing to marry the defendant and that he made an unconditional promise to marry her, which promise the defendant grossly violated.

Cross-examined by Lawyer Gilligan for the defence, the plaintiff admitted that she desired her three maiden sisters to reside with her after her marriage, to which proposition the defendant objected, and in consequence thereof the marriage fell through.

"The plaintiff in the action," began Judge Houlihan, in summing up, "admits to an age iv thirty-eight years, an' is clearly at the harvest period iv love. She is just hangin' on to the gutter iv the house iv love, and the feller she scorned whin she was twenty-two, she will hould in a vise at thirty-eight should he happen to put in an appearance. Some fellers' hearts are like doughnuts; whin Cupid slings his darts they go through the hole, an' don't find any resting place. There are two fellers you can't bate making love an' winning hearts; it is the lad who carried her slate to school, an' the star boarder or lodger who pays his way in advance. They are professionals at wimmins' hearts; all the rest iv

us are novices. Ivery one gits a dowry iv some soort; if the bride is rich, you git the money; if she is poor, your father-in-law will settle the rist iv the family on you to support. Wimmin can git around a man like a cooper round a barrel; they pritind to give a man his own way just to pacify him, but in reality he is only in the same condition as a tethered animal, he occasionally gets to the ind iv his tether, but the wimmin retain complete control iv all his actions unbeknownest to himself.

"Laundries and delicattessen stores are to blame for the increase in old bachelors; the wimmin dodge the washing, and that manes a hundred dollars a year more for washing, or the equivalent iv four months' rint, an' they are beginning to dodge cooking, an' a twentieth-cintury groom wakes up an finds himself without a laundry or a larder at home, an' for all intints an' purposes he might as well be wedded to a Chinese laundry or a frankfurt establishment.

"Now ivery man knows that whare three ould maids are to live under the one roof there's bound to be throuble; they would be chattering like magpies all the day long, and poor Tim would eventually have to ind his days in an asylum. Hannah encountered a legal Norman's Woe whin she put conditions. on a contract which was otherwise absolute; she should have performed her part iv the contract an' thin had her sisters come to live wid her afterwards, but not doing so, I must find that she did not offer her heart in fee simple to Tim, but gave him a contingint remainder, an' my finding must be that there was no mating iv minds an' there must be judgment for the defindant."