selected quite at random, currente calamo) produces from these tables by the above method,—
Martia damna palam producunt prælia dira,—
a line quite unexceptionable either to parse or to scan, and conveying quite as much meaning as the average of modern verse; though the only mental operation employed in forming it was the slightly monotonous one of counting from one up to nine.[1]
I doubt not that any legal reader whose patience has followed me through this description of an ingenious though long-forgotten device, has already perceived the possibilities with which it is pregnant, and anticipated the invention I am about to announce. In that case, while I feel all the generous glow of an author's soul in anticipating his sympathetic response, I must at the same time remark that the invention itself is already copyright. I have filed a caveat in the Patent Office at Washington to secure to myself the benefits that will undoubtedly accrue from "Tables for the construction of briefs on all questions of law, adapted to the use of either plaintiff or defendant, and brought down to the latest published reports." Perhaps the publication of this article may also be constructive notice of my rights; all of which, I beg to say, are "reserved,"—though I acknowledge I have never quite comprehended the legal force of that phrase so dear to English publishers. But it is not in the mere expectation of vulgar profit that I now commit it to the "Green Bag."
My soul expands as I contemplate the future uses of my invention, and the rapidity with which it will enable my professional brethren to advance in the direction toward which they have already been moving for some time past. At once simple and complete, it will revolutionize the argument of cases in all courts, and raise the law from a mere handicraft to the dignity and certainty of mechanical science. If an unknown inventor of the eighteenth century could in eleven small tables of a, b, c, etc., condense all the learning and genius of Latin poetry, and enable a mere child to write hexameters, why cannot the genius of the nineteenth by a like device enable his countrymen, "without distinction of age, sex, or previous condition" to argue questions of law, or advise clients thereon, saving the tedious waste of time and labor that has hitherto been a condition precedent, or the expenditure of precious time in turning the leaves of text-books and digests that has been indispensable to its execution? May not even treatises be written by its aid? It will not indeed be possible to reduce all the questions of law contained in the thirty odd volumes of the United States Digest to a mere dozen of tables. I appreciate the vast extent and in finite complexity of legal science too well to entertain vague dreams of bringing it within the six feet of a hexameter verse. But the principle is the same; and principle, as Lord Mansfield justly remarked (Cowp. 39), is the life of the law, or words to that effect. The principle of my invention, as of that which suggested it, is to reduce the formation of a brief to a purely scientific process, free from all necessity of thought or learning in the attorney preparing it; and in this I humbly submit that I am carrying out to perfection the aim at which our text-writers, digest-makers, and editors of (useful) law magazines have been diligently and more or less consciously striving for a generation past.
Indeed, it is the advance already made in this direction that insures the success of the new method; since it is only the carrying out, and, so to speak, the culmination, of present ones. Who now sits down painfully to think out an argument on a legal question from the principles slowly ripened in his
- ↑ Even this might have been saved if it had not been the writer's first attempt at actual use of the tables. From their construction, as above described, it will be seen that when the position of the first letter in a desired word is fixed in the upper line of the table, one has only to cast his eye diagonally down and to the left to read the whole word off-hand. The tables themselves may be found, if any one has a curiosity to see them, in any old copy of Bailey's Dictionary, vol. ii. That before me has the imprint of "Third edition, Lond., 1737," and the tables are found under the words Hexameter and Pentameter respectively.
