NEW LAW BOOKS.
// is the intention of The Green Bag to have its book reviews Britten by competent reviewers. The usual custom of magazines is to confine book notices to books sent in for review. At the request of contributors, however, The Green Bag will be glad to review or notice any recently published law book, -whether re ceivedfor review or not. A TREATISE ON THE AMERICAN LAW OF REAL PROPERTY. By Emory Washburn, LL.D. Sixth edition. By John Wurts, M. A., LL.B. 3 vols. Boston : Little, Brown and Com pany. 1902. Law sheep; $18. The question is often put, "why do so many new books appear when the old ones are just as good, or indeed better than the new?" And the answer is, as publishers could easily tell if they would, unsatisfying. The craze for the new is the incentive in some cases, but the lawyer not only wants some thing new, 'but something accurate as well in order that the work may be used in and out of court. He buys the new work because he either feels or is made to feel that he cannot well do without it; that the most recent authorities are cited and digested in text or notes. He looks up the references and finds them sufficient or insufficient. In the first case, he consults the new book 'because he finds it useful; in the other case, he goes back to the old because he has found it useful, and supplements it by digests and other aids at his disposal to make it serve his present and practical purpose. In the realm of real prop erty, there is no "recent" work to claim the field and the tried and trusted Washburn ap pears in a sixth edition, revised and brought down to the year 1902. The advice some times administered to others than lawyers applies here with a peculiar force: "'Tis well to be off with the old love Before you are on with the new." A new edition of Washburn was desirable for various reasons. The original treatise was needed when first published in two vol umes in 1860-61. It at once took but did not force the market, because it was not only the best but the only book on the subject suited to the needs of the American lawyer. The
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four editions brought out in the lifetime of the eminent and venerable author sought to, and did in a way, improve the treatise, and render it more serviceable to the profession, but the revisions to which it was subjected were done in a desultory way. The learned professor corrected a passage here to which his attention had been called; he inserted a passage there which; further developed the thought he had in mind, but which for one reason or another he had not clearly ex pressed. The same process was repeated throughout the entire work, so that the trea tise finally left the author's hands in a patched form. Accuracy and added value were ob tained at the expense of repetition and not infrequent contradiction, but the symmetry of the book suffered. In the present edition Professor Wurts has pruned with a discriminating hand these vari ous additions, corrections and interpolations, so that the text now appears as an unbroken and regular whole; where necessary it has been to some extent rearranged throughout in a way to destroy, and "all verbal changes of importance, for the sake either of clear ness or of brevity, and all of the editor's original work, by way either of substitution or of addition, are shown by brackets," so that it might be maintained, although the edi tor does not so claim, that the work appears in this last edition a"s the learned author would have had it appear had he prepared the treatise for publication as an original work in 1902 instead of in 1860. Turning now to the book as it appears from the hands of author and editor, the pur pose is everywhere evident to make the text and notes truly represent the law in its pres ent state. A cursory examination of the first chapter on the "Nature and Classification of Real Property," shows how completely the editor has mastered, modified and bracketed the text, but it is so skillfully done that the context is not at all broken or jarred. As an example of the care with which the editor annotates and supplements the text by a note, reference may be made to pages 66-68, in which the statutory provisions of the vari ous States are given in briefest form which
