Sherlock Holmes
Plots and Strategy.
fession that comment would be superfluous. They are a sufficient monument to the fame of the very greatest. A careful study of them, an intelligent grasp of the legal prin ciples involved and set forth in them, would make any one a well-equipped lawyer. It would be a great and grateful task to classify all his opinions and to treat them adequately. But such a work would require a lifetime of close application. It would result in a com plete treatise upon almost every branch of the law, and would leave the writer with a legal knowledge second only to that of his great master. I believe that this is no hyperbole, that it is no exaggeration. Yet I am sadly persuaded that his great work will never re ceive the just recognition due to it from the profession. His reputation would have been paramount had his career been fifty years earlier. The past twenty-five years have been a time of transition and iconoclasm. Precedents have counted for little, and therefore scientific jurisprudence has counted for less. Elsewhere I have ven tured to record a protest against this ten dency of the law, — vox clamantis in deserto, — and shall not reiterate it here. But the uprooting of legal foundations
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necessarily will deprive one of our greatest jurists of the fair fame he has justly earned. In many directions his life work will leave little impress upon the law. His great learning, embodied in his opinions, by means of which he solved so many great legal questions, will help few of his successors in the solution of new problems, because juris prudence has ceased to be a science. But by the lovers and students of the old sci ence, I venture to believe that the name of Mr. Justice Gray will be placed beside those of Coke and Mansfield, Hardwicke and Stowell, Blackburn and Jessel, Cairns and Marshall. He has been a great case law yer, but he has also been much more. He has shown himself to be a bold, ingenious, and deep reasoner. He has adapted old principles to new facts, and when occasion has arisen he has created principles, based on such sound foundations and buttressed by such perfect analogies and sound logic that they have been accepted at once by the profession, and hardly recognized as new. This is the work of a great scientific jurist. "When comes another such? Never, I think, Till the sun drop dead from the signs."
SHERLOCK HOLMES' PLOTS AND STRATEGY. Bv J. B. Mackenzie. TAKING up a little while ago for diver sion the collection of Conan Doyle's entertaining detective stories, which, with his Sign of the Four, made him famous, — the writer could not fail to perceive how much his characters' methods, meant to be those of a clear-sighted, well-disciplined worker, justify criticism; how often, from unstable premises, he builds faulty conclu sions. New interest, by the way, is just now
aroused in the novelist's hero — as much the distinguishing product of his brain as Gulliver is of Swift's, or Robinson Crusoe of Defoe's — on account of his resurgence, after his extinction was decreed, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is right to premise that while this con ception of his theory and practice will be duly impressed as the discussion proceeds, not the least aim of this essay is to inquire
