Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/165

REyiEWS. 145 statutory period. Held, that as the trustee is barred from recovering the property in equity by analogy to the Statute of Limitations, so are the cestuis que trust barred, though they were infants or not yet born at the time of the wrongful conveyance. Will- son V. Louisville Trust Co., 44 S. W. Rep. 121 (Ky.). See Notes. Trusts — Dedication for Public Use — Parties. — Land was conveyed by deed to the selectmen of a town for use as a public park only. A bill in equity was brought by the grantor to restrain the erection of a school building upon the lot. Held, that such a use is inconsistent with the terms of the trust and the bill will lie. Rowzee v. Pierce, 23 So. Rep. 307 (Miss.). If land is dedicated to public use without a deed, it is the general doctrine that the dedicator grants an easement only. He retains the soil for every purpose not incon- sistent with the public easement, and may maintain appropriate actions for any en- croachment upon it. St Mary's . Jacobs, L. R. 7 Q. H. 53; Bliss v. Ball, 97 Mass. 597. But when the dedicator parts with the fee it is difficult to see what interest he retains in the land, and as in the case of a charitable trust the Attorney-General would seem to be the proper party to represent the rights of the public. However, as in the principal case, it is generally held that the grantor still has such an interest as to entitle him to enforce the trust as originally declared. Warren v. Lyons City, 22 Iowa, 351 ; Gilman v. Milwaukee, 55 Wis. 328. REVIEWS. Township and Borough ; being the Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford, 1897. By Frederic William Maitland, LL. D. Cambridge [Eng,] : University Press. 1898. In these lectures Professor Maitland renews his investigations into the history of boroughs and of the land laws, dealing especially with the legal ownership of the common waste in a borough like Cambridge, which was in no one's lordship. He establishes successfully, with the charm of style no other writer on English law possesses, that one can hardly find owner- ship in such land apart from the right of users ; that the grant of the town of Cambridge by King John to its burgesses did not convey a prop- erty right in common or waste ; that where aggregate ownership can be predicated one cannot distinguish common from corporate ownership ; and that when, in 1803, the common arable fields of Cambridge were to be inclosed, there were really no owners of the balks and waste. As he sums up his thesis, " it is exceedingly hard to disengage those elements of property and rulership which are blent in the medieval dominium, and to unravel those strands of corporateness and commonness which are twined in the medieval commu?iitas." These lectures are more than usually full of striking and epigrammatic suggestions. Of the fiction — if, as he doubts, it is a fiction — of corpo- rate ownership, the author truly says that we must not regard the fiction as the work of lawyers. "The lawyer is not the motive force, but the drag on the wheel, and must protest that the layman is (if you please) ' feigning ' more rapidly than the law will allow. It is not the lawyer, but the man of business, who makes the mercantile firm into a person distinct from the sum of the partners. It is the layman who complains that the club cannot get its club-house without ' some lawyer's nonsense about trustees.' " " Law sees differences of kind where nature has made differ- ences of degree." " Explorations in foreign climes may often tell us what to look for, but never what to find." " The man who is reaping his acre-strip will be able to enjoy some of the forthcoming bread and beer ;