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This accomplished, the fourteenth chapter is devoted principally to the widely, and above quoted rule laid down in Lickbarrow v. Mason: 1

"We may lay it down as a broad general principle that whenever one of two innocent persons must suffer by the act of a third, he who enables such third person to occasion the loss must sustain it."

And the assertion is ventured that that rule is "but a short and pregnant statement of the essential principles of estoppel by assisted misrepresentation." Chapter XV is an endeavor to declare with precision the nature and effect of estoppel. And chapter XVI discusses the relation of estoppel to deceit.

The way having been thus cleared — the principles of estoppel having been defined, and their effect and foreign relations (as it were) determined the remaining twelve chapters are devoted to the application of those principles to different forms of property and various departments of the law to lands,

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goods, choses in action, documents of title, execution of documents, principal and agent, and partnership; with the result, as is hoped, that the principles of the earlier half of the book will be found not only workable in each of these departments, but of much service in the elucidation of problems which at present (for lack of them) are either relegated to the unsatisfactory catalogue of anomalies, or are recommended to our understandings by fictions of more or less impossibility.

The writer cannot fail to be impressed with the gravest ap. prehensions as he hands over to the profession the result of his labors upon a programme such as this. Nevertheless he has a strong conviction that although many defects in his work may be found, the main positions which he has assumed are right, or very nearly so, and that into harmony with them must be

1(1787) 2 T. R. 63.

brought several departments of the law. He has, at all events, contributed something towards a scientific synthesis of a very difficult subject.

To prevent frequent repetition, it may be said here, once for all, that liberty has been taken with many of the quotations appearing in the book, to the extent of italicizing some of the words, in order that the mind of the reader may be the more easily carried to the point to which attention is at the moment desired.

J. S. E.

WINNIPEG, MANITOBA, 1900.

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