A passage follows that the student of persona, and of 'semi-personality and demi-semi-personality',[1] will detach and appropriate on its own account:
'It rests to touch the other cause naturall, for that other impossibility, which may be the continuall fluxe and instability of the Sea; in such sort, that it would appear not aye to be one and the selfe same body, but daily changeable. For answer, I must remember that which the Iurisconsult sets down so prettily: Suppose (sayes he) a certain Colledge of Iudges, or a Legion of Souldiers, or the particular parts of a Ship, or of a mans body, should so continually and often be changed and altred, that none of that first Colledge or Legion could be found alive, nor yet any part of the Shippe or body could be so certainly demonstrate, that it might be affirmed for the very same that it was at the first; yet if that Colledge or Legion be in number full, and the ship or man whole and able in all the frame, they shall be accounted and esteemed not to be new, but to be the very same which they were at the beginning: even so, however the sea many waies and hourly changes, in the small parts thereof, by the ordinary rush on land, mixture with other waters, swelling in it selfe, exhalation and backe receipts thereof by raine; yet since the great body of the Sea most constantly keepes the set place prescribed by the Creator, I see not in this respect neither, wherefore the nature of the Sea should not yeeld to occupation and conquest. And thus farre concerning Mare liberum his last and great conclusion, against all appropriation thereof by people or princes.'[2]
To Welwod belongs the twofold distinction of having written the first book printed in Britain on Sea Law,[3] and of
- ↑ Maitland, on 'Moral and Legal Personality', in the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation, vi. (1906), p. 200.
- ↑ Abridgement, pp. 226–8. See Selden, Mare Clausum, lib. i, cap. xxi 'Respondetur Obiectioni de Natura Maris fluxili et perpetuo mutante'.
- ↑ The work of 1590. The claim is exclusive of mere translations of works into English. There is extant a very early English translation of an old version of the Rolls of Oleron, entitled 'The Rutter of the Sea', printed
