fiftieth time, has at last gone through the House of Lords and thus become a law. It has always pre vailed in the House of Commons, but hitherto the priests of the sixteenth century, who infest the upper house and obstruct many kinds of advanced and necessary legislation, have rallied to defeat the meas ure, which is probably welcomed by nine-tenths of the people of England. As a sample of the arguments against it, reference need be made only to the con tention that its passage would increase homicide, or rather uxoricide, on the part of husbands possessed by the temptation to marry their wives' sisters. A man who can raise that argument will argue any thing, and there is no use in seriously answering him. In our humble judgment such marriages are the very fittest, especially where there are children by the first marriage. The civil prohibition of such marriages arose in a statute of the ultra-chaste reign of Henry VIII. The only ecclesiastical objection to such marriages is one that cannot be found in Scripture, but is read into it by the bishops in the most ingeniously absurd manner. In Leviticus, vi, 6, it is said : " None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him." The priests say this is a mistranslation; it should be, "flesh of his flesh." The Bible also says that husband and wife are " one flesh." Therefore the wife's sister is flesh of the husband! Q. e. d. It seems somewhat inconsistent with this argument that the Mosaic law should have enjoined it on the deceased husband's unmarried brothers to espouse his widow. But what is the use of arguing with bishops? Sentiment stands in the place of reason to them, and prejudice is their law. But at last they have been beaten by a majority of twenty-nine, and England no longer stands in the absurd attitude of holding incestuous and void a species of marriage which is respectable and valid in all her colonies. At an early day (1827), this eccleiastical vagary seems to have been regarded as law in Virginia (Kelly v. Scott, 5 Gratt. 479), but in 1837, it was distinctly repudiated in Vermont (Blodget v. Brinsmaid, 9 Vt. 27), where the Court said: "Though a man is by affinity brother to his wife's sister, yet upon the death of his wife he may lawfully marry her sister." " The relationship by affinity ceases with the dissolution of the marriage which produced it." These seem to be the only cases in which this doctrine has received any notice in our courts Nursery Conjectures. — In the present century of learned historical conjectures, some ingenious men have discovered history in nursery rhymes. In 1837 Mr. J. B. Ker published a book in two volumes entitled "The Archaeology of Nursery Rhymes," in which he undertook to show that " by rendering the
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Nursery Rhymes of Old England into Dutch words having a resemblance in sound more or less far fetched, strings of words could be obtained, which with a little arrangement were capable of being represented as a tirade against monarchism, sacer dotalism, Catholicism." As Mr. Baring-Gould points out, in a recent attractive volume of "Nursery Songs and Rhymes," none of these Netherland renderings have survived in Holland, the most Protestant country in the world, and there is no explanation of the exportation to England. In 1862, Henry George published an attempt to show that "The House that Jack Built" is an historical allegory. For example, "the man all tattered and torn" represented the Protestant Church under Henry VIII, persecuted, tortured and despoiled. One has usually derived the impression that it was the Catholic church that then suffered. The kissing of "the maiden all forlorn" signifies Elizabeth's union of the churches. Not to be outdone, let us suggest that the game of "Simon Says Thumbs Up" is a survival of the Roman days, when the thumb turned up or down by the spectators at gladiatorial shows determined the fate of the con quered. The Roman nurses taught this to their infant charges!
NOTES OF CASES. A Small Boy's Flight. — The small boy likes to fly high, when the flight is of his own seeking, but in Devine v. Brooklyn Heights R. Co., 1 App. Div. (N. Y.) 237, his flight was involuntary and his de scent Icarian. The defendant was engaged in string ing cables upon iron poles in the street; several hun dred feet of cable hung in loops from the cross-bars of the poles; a loop lay in the gutter for about thirty feet; the small boy, eight years old, endeavoring to cross the street, the cable was suddenly and without warning drawn taut by a team of horses at the end, caught him between the legs, tossed him up twenty or twenty-five feet, and in falling his skull was fractured and he was killed. The complaint was dismissed at the trial, but on appeal this was reversed. The defendant claimed that the cable was drawn taut slowly, but the Court on appeal cleverly answered this by saying that if so it would have been impossible that the lad should have been thrown up twenty feet into the air.
Slave Law. — A curious memorial of the days of human slavery in this country is to be found in Flora, a Slave, v. State, 4 Porter (Ala.), 11 1, where it was held that on an indictment against a slave, it was essen tial that the name of his owner should be proved and found by the jury. This was because the statute re quired the jury to assess the value of the slave, and
