process of eliminating non-essentials to arrive at an accurate statement of a rule of law is often a matter which requires a patient comparison of allied cases.

87. Books of authority.-While statutes and reports are the chief forms in which the law is to be found, some treatises of long-tested value have an authority for the law of their period akin to that of statutes or decided cases. They may be cited and relied on as accurately stating the law in cases where judicial authority is not available. Of these the most noteworthy are: Glanvil's Treatise on the Laws of England, written in Henry II's time; Bracton's Laws and Customs of England, written in Henry III's time; Littleton's Book of Tenures, of the time of Edward IV; and Coke's Institutes, of the time of Elizabeth and James I. Glanvil and Bracton are useful mainly in giving a picture of the early common law; Littleton, with Coke's commentary on his book, is the great authority on the law of real property in the period when its outlines largely became fixed; Coke's Institutes cover the common law of his day.

88. Treatises and text-books.-To the work of extracting the principles of law from the primary authorities, bringing together those on related topics, and arranging them into a logical development of some branch of the law, many able and learned men have given great time and labor. Their treatises have value not only as making the law more accessible and intelligible but also as serving by criticism and suggestion to further its development. Text-books and treatises differ widely in usefulness

and value, but good ones are indispensable aids to the student, and the considered opinions of great text writers have no inconsiderable weight with courts of law. To get the best results from the use of a text-book in study, the student should preserve toward it an attitude of friendly criticism. He should test his understanding of its abstract statements by trying to invent concrete cases for their application, and should further test the soundness of the statement, when he is sure he understands it, by inquiring whether it will give what seems a just solution of the cases he has imagined. Where the language of the text is not grasped or seems unsound, the student should refer to the cases cited in support of it, and examine them closely to see how far they bear out the rule stated. The danger of the exclusive use of text-books is that the student comes to rely on his text-book as authority, and ceases to think for himself. Such a habit is fatal to success in the legal profession.

89. Search-books-Digests-Citators. The enormous accumulation of reported cases makes the task of finding the law on any given point a difficult one. It would be impossible without an elaborate and systematic indexing of the contents of the reports. The initial step in this indexing is the syllabus or headnote found at the head of each reported case. The headnote is prepared usually by the reporter, but in some jurisdictions by the judge handing down the opinion reported. Catchwords prefixed to the paragraphs of the note serve to index the various propositions, under a scheme of classification which groups

the subject-matter of the law in some logical or convenient form; and the material thus assorted is arranged alphabetically in an index-digest at the end of the volume. This material is also brought together from time to time in digests collecting in one alphabet the propositions of law from the cases decided in a state or group of states, and also in a digest which covers the whole of the United States. A system of subdivision of the field of law and an equally elaborate scheme of cross-referencing enable the digest-makers to arrange this vast mass of material in very accessible form. By use of these digests, which have now been prepared for all the leading common law jurisdictions, both American and British, it is now possible to find all the reported decisions having bearing on any proposition of law.

The best known digest system for comprehensive work is that termed the American Digest System.. It consists of a "Century Digest" of all state and federal cases from 1658 to 1896, of a "Decennial Digest" of cases decided in the same jurisdictions from 1897 to 1906, of annual and semi-annual volumes of such cases, and of advance sheets delivered from month to month-enabling one, by the use of these various volumes, to locate old and current authorities on any adjudicated legal problem.

90. Encyclopedias.-Encyclopedias stand somewhere between search-books and digests. They may be divided into two classes-one, represented by the American and English Encyclopedia of Law, and the Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure, attempts to cover the whole field of law by an alphabetically arranged

series of articles on legal topics, stating briefly in the text the doctrines developed and furnishing full citations to the authorities in notes; the other, of which this work is typical, seeks to state concisely the fundamental principles of the various topics into which the law may be divided, without any detailed collection of authorities. The former class approximates the search-book, the latter the text-book or treatise.

91. Text-books and citators.-A text-book itself furnishes in its cited authorities a very useful index to the primary authorities. The subsequent references in the decisions of the same jurisdiction to any decided case, showing in what later cases it has been approved, criticised, or rejected as authority, have been collected in what are called citators, and modern volumes of reports also furnish an index of such matters for the cases they contain.

A student should familiarize himself as rapidly as possible with the more or less mechanical but highly useful art of searching authorities. This familiarity can come only by practice with the search books, which are the apparatus of his profession. But time and labor will be saved by a careful preliminary study of the plans on which these elaborate indexes are built. The same suggestion applies in the case of text-books. The first step in using any of the lawyer's tools is to acquaint oneself with its construction.

92. Conclusion.-Only by careful adherence to system both in his search for authority and in the arrangement of his acquisitions can the lawyer make

his knowledge available in practice. The legal mind is essentially an orderly and systematic one, apt at classifying and pigeon-holing the results of judicial thought and experiment and its supplementing by the activities of the legislature. No assiduity of practice to attain habits of system can be misspent. But system is after all only the anatomy of the law. Its life blood is reason; and patient study of the methods of thinking of its great expounders must be persisted in until the processes of legal reasoning become familiar and natural to the student. And an element of the legal mind even more fundamentally important is the constant recognition that the law is essentially a means to justice as an end. The soul of the law is justice. The task of the legal profession, practitioner as well as judge, is to seek to realize, through the mechanism of the law, that adjustment of human interests to the securing of social progress which is the constantly developing ideal of justice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

F. Pollock, A First Book of Jurisprudence (3rd ed., 1912); W. M. Geldart, Elements of English Law (1911); J. W. Salmond, Jurisprudence (3rd ed., 1910); T. E. Holland, Jurisprudence (11th ed., 1910); J. C. Gray, The Nature and Sources of the Law (1909).

F. W. Maitland, Outlines of English Legal History, 560-1600 A. D., in Collected Papers, Vol. ii, pp. 417-496 (1911); E. Jenks, A Short History of English Law (1912); Select Essays in AngloAmerican Legal History, 3 vols.; Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law to the Time of Edward I., 2 vols. (2nd ed., 1898); W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 3 vols.

E. Wambaugh, Study of Cases (2nd ed., 1894); Brief Making (2nd ed., 1909).