exempt from giving a bond as such executrix," read "without bond.'1 In the beginning, " and testa ment " seems superfluous. There is no wonder that the legislature had to pass an act restraining the chief and his fellows from writing long opinions! EDUCATION AND GKNICS. — Judge Thompson said, substantially, in an address on Jackson, that correct spelling is not essential to administrative greatness, and cited Cromwell, Washington and Napoleon as proofs . This gives the Chairman an excuse for lugging in some remarks to the same effect made by him in a recent address on education :— ' • You may be startled by my proposition that genius does not need education, but I speak of a very few — of one or two or three of a century who really deserve the name of genius, such as Homer, Shakespeare, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Beethoven, Michael Angelo, Abraham Lincoln, all comparativelv un educated men. If Homer had been a profoundly educated man, he might possibly have been as absurd a pedant as those German commentators who insist that he was a syndicate and can tell us exactly what verses have been interpolated since the original poems were first recited. If Shakespeare had been as well educated as his contemporary, Bacon, he would prob ably have written as bad verses as he. Could a broad education have made a greater soldier or a wiser civil administrator of Napoleon? Would the ability to spell correctly have added anything to the moral stature of Washington? "What did education ever do for Abraham Lin coln? Who wrote the wisest, most admirably expressed State papers of modern times? Look at the difference between mere talent and heaven-descended genius, as shown at the dedication of the Gettysburg Cemetery, where the best educated and most polished orator of his day and the comparatively uneducated President came in competition. Edward Everett, scholarly and elegant, with all the artifices of a trained declaimer, delivered from memory an ora tion three hours long. Abraham Lincoln, ungainly, homely, awkward, read through his spectacles, and a little through his nose, in a tone inaudible fiftyfeet distant, an address fifteen minutes in length. Very few of us have read Everett's oration, and nobody in the future will read it, but those inspired words of Abraham Lincoln, with the soul of the seer and martyr behind them, have been read by every intelligent man, woman and youth ¡n our land, and never by any of us who lived in this time without tears and silent blessing. They are in the pages of school readers; they will be read and admired 2,400 years hence even more than those of Pericles on a similar occasion are now admired, though spoken 2,400 years ago; and they will inspire a noble love of
country in our descendants when the very name of Everett shall be forgotten. Now this gift is something which education could not have given and could not have enhanced." ROOSTER LAW. -— Some time ago the Chairman queried whether he had a right to an injunction against early-rising roosters in the immecJiate vicinity of his domicile. In respect to this, Mr. C. E. Littlefield of Rockland, Me., writes him as follows : — I had called to my attention recently a case which, although it is not perhaps an illustration of the elasticity of the common law, is an illustration of an application of its well settled principles to a novel state of facts. In connection with your early waking and late rising, during the interval between which you seem to have been seriously oppressed by the unbridled conduct of certain roosters, I thought ic would perhaps interest you to know that the court of Maine, in the case referred to, have recently held that the keeping of hens (and roosters included, of course), under circumstances evidently like those to which you refer, constituted a nuisance kept at the annoyance of the plaintiff, for which he was entitled to damages. See the unreported case of Timothy K. Desmond г: James H. Smith, Androscoggin County. In that case, however, only nominal damages were assessed, as the plaintiff expressed his willingness to accept such a result, probably being satisfied with having estab lished his right to maintain the action. You will therefore observe that you have a remedy at law, and while you might not be able to sustain an injunc tion until you had established at law the fact of the nuisance, and the roosters had demonstrated an intention to continue indefinitely to your irreparable damage, it is not absolutely necessary for you to take the law into your own hands, because there is yet a " Balm in Gilead " for sufferers like yourself.
CAVE. -— In reading the comments of the " London Legal Press " on the recent death of Mr. Justice Cave, the Chairman is led to suspect that there was a bear inside that Cave.
NOTES OF CASES. UNHEALTHY JAIL.— If a man is compelled to be in carcerated in an unhealthy jail, although it makes no difference as to his health or comfort whether it is owned by a county, a town, ora city, yet it seems he may be better off in his purse if it is a town or a city jail. It has recently been held in North Carolina that a town is liable for injury to the health of a prisoner by confinement in an iron or steel guard house, with a tin or zinc floor covered with ice, and with broken windows, during a bitter cold, windynight in which he gutters intensely and has his feet badly frostbitten, when the authorities had known
