be devoted exclusively to its use, will, without doubt, be erected in the near future. The Law Library contains at the present time about seven thousand volumes. All sets of reports are kept up to date; and the collection is constantly being enlarged and enriched by additions. The books of this library are at all times accessible to the students of the school, as are the private libraries of the professors, which are located on the same floor. The General Library of the University, which is also open to use by students in the School of Law, contains about ninety-eight thousand seven hundred volumes, besides twenty-six thousand pamphlets. This includes the President-White Library of History and Political Science, containing about thirty thousand volumes and ten thousand pamphlets, presented to the University, in 1887, by ex-President Andrew D. White.
Although young in years, the School of Law of Cornell University must, we think, be regarded as far beyond the experimental stage, and as giving promise of a future that will more than meet the most sanguine expectations of those who were immediately instrumental in its founding.
BARBAROUS LEGAL CUSTOMS.
NO person who has visited the Tower of London can have failed to remark the many instruments of torture now shown there as curiosities; but notwithstanding the opinions of many great lawyers, and among the rest Blackstone, there seems to be very good reason for believing that their use was not always regarded in the same light which it is at the present day. The presence of some of these in the Tower is, indeed, accounted for, they having been brought to England by the Dukes of Exeter and Suffolk, ministers of Henry VI, who made an attempt to introduce the civil law into England; and the rack, which is there still, was called, in derision, " the Duke of Exeter's daughter." They were, however, used as instruments of law in that reign; for Fuller in his "Worthies" mentions the case of one Haw kins who was then tortured to extort evi dence; and some arguments, which show that their use was more general than is usu ally supposed, may be found in Barrington's "Observations on the Statutes." It is com monly supposed that torture is one of the evils guarded against in Magna Charta, but the only reason for the supposition is Sir
Edward Coke's interpretation of a passage in that celebrated statute. The words are that " no free man shall be destroyed except by the legal judgment of his peers or by law." Nitllus liber homo destruatur nisi per legalejudicium parium sitorum aut per legem terra. And, " destroyed," according to Sir Edward Coke, means tortured, as well as killed or maimed. But whether judicial torture, properly so called, was ever a part of the English judi cial system or not, there cannot be the least doubt of the existence of a practice just as barbarous, called " peine fort et dure." This, which is vulgarly called "pressing to death," consisted in placing the accused, in case he refused to plead, naked, on his back, with a hollow under his head, in a low dark cham ber in the prison, and putting on his body as great a weight as he could bear and more, (so ran the sentence), and feeding him, al ternately, with the coarsest bread and the most filthy water that could be procured. There are many instances of men having undergone this savage punishment in order to save their estates for the benefit of their children, as they would be forfeited if the prisoner, by pleading, submitted to a trial
