Reviews of Books general relations between matters of fact and rules of law, and the various functions of judge and jury. Its final chapters are properly appropriated to a limited consideration of the vast subject of Knowledge, divided, for con venience, into Judicial, Common, and Special. The second volume, following out the same line of treatment, discusses the branches of the law of evidence in which the element of administration, always unavoidably present, is least operative. It begins with "Burden of Proof," and "Burden of Evidence," and therein "the writer makes a very useful dis tinction," says Judge Ward in The John H. Starin (C. C. A. 2d circuit, November, 1911), 191 Fed. Rep. 800, 801. Then come "Presumptions"; "In ferences of Fact"; "Presumptions of Law"; "Pseudo-Presumptions"; "Ad ministrativeAssumptions"; "Admissions; Judicial"; "Admissions; Extra-Judicial"; "Admissions; by Conduct"; "Offers of Compromise"; "Confessions"; "Former Evidence." In the third and fourth volumes attention is given to the operation of the four so-called exclusionary rules — Opinion, Hearsay, Res Inter Alios, and Character. Among the many tens of thousands of cases cited in this 1911-1912 treatise, a vast number are cases recently reported. It is written primarily for the use of busy practising lawyers, and there is no grossness in the suggestion that, apart from its value as a scientific exposition of the law of evidence, it is entitled to a prominent place on lawyers' shelves, because of the unquestionable fact, attested by Matthew Arnold, that "far more of our mistakes come from want of fresh knowledge than from want of correct reasoning." (Literature and Dogma, Introduction.) And the author
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and publishers will of course keep the volumes up to date by means of supple ments issued from time to time, as is customary with works of such magni tude and exceptional merit. At the end of volume two is an elaborate and skilfully compiled "Tem porary Index to Vols. I and II." The portly volumes are strongly bound and in every other way creditable to the publishers.
POLLOCK'S "GENIUS OF COMMON LAW"
THE
The Genius of the Common Law. By Rt. Hon. Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart., D.C.L., LL.D., of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister-at-Law, honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Carpenter Lecturer, Columbia University, 1911. Columbia University Press, New York. ($1.50 net.)
THESE lectures, which pursue the method neither of a technical treatise nor or of a historical account, have a charm all their own hard to define. Sir Frederick Pollock has done much more than to summarize, within the confines of a short work remarkable not less for plenitude of matter than for artistry of form, the more salient qualities of the common law both in its development through the centuries and in its present estate. He has also intro duced many pregnant observations, pertinent to the matter in hand, which radiate light into related subjects of broad expanse and deepen the interest by the frequency of present-day appli cations. The reader will find the book an inspiration as well as a diversion, for it presents with equal vividness the traditions of the common law and the ideals which it has transmitted to the profession of practising lawyers. We believe that an appreciation of the profitableness of knowledge of the early history of the English law is rather more abundant, among American
