had hitherto seemed to be ephemeral. Dr. Lawson makes no reference to the decision of the court of appeals in Wynehamer v. People (13 N. Y. 378), which reversed the court below (20 Barbour 567, 11 How. 530), and held that the act of April 9, 1855, was unconstitutional. He refers to the advocate's connection with the trial of Guiteau, although without any mention of the famous cross-examination of the prisoner which probably more than anything that occurred upon the trial convinced the jury that Guiteau was responsible for his act. He does not, however, refer to the fact that Judge Porter served on the New York court of appeals from 1865 to 1867. The absence of any biography of Nicholas Hill, jr., who was Judge Porter's associate in the Albany trial, is unfortunate. He was, perhaps, the greatest common lawyer who has practised in the state of New York. His briefs that are preserved in the reports are still used as models for legal arguments. He was the editor of Hill's Reports. His portrait is in the court-house of the New York court of appeals. He and Judge Eseck Cowen are the joint authors of that great repository of learning, Cowen and Hill's Notes to Phillips on Evidence. It is surprising that an author such as Dr. Lawson, who has himself produced a meritorious treatise upon a topic of that branch of the law, should not, in the biography of Judge Cowen, when referring to that book, have shown an appreciation of its value.
Rufus Choate surely deserves more than the skeleton of a biography which is contained in the note after his name. The traditions and anecdotes concerning him which are still repeated in Massachusetts should have been preserved in a work like this which is intended to be a legal classic. The bibliographical note to the trial of André does not mention Chandler's Criminal Trials although Chandler is quoted in the subsequent report of the trial of Joshua H. Smith.
Those who use the work as a book of reference will be inconvenienced by the persistence of the editor in his habit of inserting much important historical matter in his prefaces without adequate references to them in the notes to the subsequent reports of the trials. But this generation and posterity should be grateful to Dr. Lawson for his labors.
The Jahrbuch of 1916 opens with a thorough study of the life and works of Carl Follen, by G. W. Spindler. Here for the first time all biographical sources are taken into account, both the German, of Treitschke, Biedermann, Haupt, and Pregizer, treating Pollen's revolutionary activity, and the American, beginning with but by no means limited to
