possess influence in regard to law reform than its members could ever hope to exercise as members of local societies or faculties, no matter how wealthy and long established such local societies or faculties may be able to boast themselves. We were pleased, therefore, that a scheme of affiliation with local faculties which was mooted during the discussion was not received with favour and was dropped. In our view the law agents of Scotland will only begin to make their legitimate influence felt in law reform when they combine in one great society; and the opinions of the members not being obtained or obtainable under present arrangements, the sectional meetings appear to us to be the likeliest means of giving vitality, of awakening an interest in the proceedings of the Society, and of collecting the opinions of provincial lawyers. Moreover, the sectional meetings will, as the mover of the motion stated, develop the best men at the various centres and cause them to be sent up to the Council, which will in this way become from year to year more representative of the profession, avoid even the risk of being a close corporation, and escape the effeteness which appears to be inseparable from such select bodies. We have pleasure in reminding our readers that three years ago we suggested local sections of the Society on much the same lines as are now laid down. (Vide vol. iv., p. 220.) Altogether the prospects of the Society appear to us to be more hopeful than ever, and we shall watch with interest and record with pleasure its advance in membership, its increase in activity, its growing influence, and its national usefulness. If the office-bearers will pardon our offering them a suggestion for the management of the Society, we would again urge their laying hold of members of the profession on the very threshold of their career by inviting every law agent when he enrols to enrol simultaneously in the Society. If this is done no future general meeting of the Society will be characterised by such a conspicuous absence of the junior, i.e. of the coming men of the profession, as distinguished the annual meeting of 1891. Literature. DE RECUPERATIONE TERRE SANCTE. Paris Alphonse Picard. 1891. Willingly we accord our scire te volumus to attest the merits and the interest of this ancient treatise. Pierre Dubois, its author, was a king's advocate of France under Philip the Fair, and he dedicated his work to Edward I., styling him king of England and Scotland. The early fourteenth century ear was all too deaf to his appeals for legal, political, and religious reform, but his book, now edited with marked insight by Professor Ch. V. Langlois, bears abundant witness to his possession of an ingenious and well-stored mind. No really great problem is ever solved. Education, the papacy, clerical celibacy, codification of the law, the land of Egypt-when will they see their extreme day? Successive centuries busy themselves to decide, but they perennially end by writing interlocutors of continuation sine die. There never will be final judgment on such themes. Pierre Dubois regarded them all and a few others as relevant for discussion under the apparently incongruous heading "On the recovery of the Holy Land." His ideas are lucid, and his book no macrology of commonplace, for his thought is bold, original, and free. Though he had faith in the influence of the stars, blamed Sathan" very pointedly for "obstructing the purpose of this "book," and trusted legends as sober history, he could break away from his age. He deprecated excommunications lest the number of the damned should become too great! He refuted as a vain thing the opinion that any single set of laws could serve the whole world, yet he advocated the expediency of putting the laws of a people into one volume, plain, brief, and clear, so as to need no gloss. He distrusted the Papal power, and would have had the patrimony of St. Peter feued out in perpetuam amphiteosim to kings and princes for an adequate annual return. Thus," says he, "the Pope, who ought to be a promoter of "peace, will not stir up wars." Although he counselled King Philip to invade and annex Egypt, "which would be worth "more to him than the realm of France itself," his dislike of war, his aspiration after a grand Catholic peace, is his one prevailing note, and he formulates a scheme of international arbitration. Cities and princes are invited to submit their quarrels to prudent, skilful, and just men (each side naming six) as arbiters, who are to consider pleadings, hear witnesses, and give judgment, aided by assessors learned in the law. Either party might appeal to the Pope, whose ultimate decree should be recorded as an eternal precedent in the chronicles of the Church. Such were the devout, yet singularly definite, imaginations of a French lawyer in the year 1306. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH ACT IN COUNTIES. By Mr. Skelton has supplemented his Handbook of Public Health by publishing in this form the various circulars issued by the Board of Supervision on matters arising under the Local Government Act of 1889, and the opinions of counsel on points connected with the administration of the Act. The supplement will be found useful to those whom it may concern as bringing the state of opinion on these matters up to date. Obituary. Mr. Kippen, At Perth, on 9th July, Mr. John Kippen, solicitor. who was one of the oldest and best known of Perthshire solicitors, was born at Aberfeldy in 1814, and after leaving school went to Perth and was apprenticed in the Sheriff-Clerk's office to the late Mr. James Murray Patton, then Sheriff-Clerk of Perthshire. After finishing his apprenticeship he went to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and at the former place was associated in business with the late Mr. John Stuart Newbigging, W.S. On that gentleman's appointment as Sheriff-Clerk of Roxburghshire Mr. Kippen returned to his native county and began business as a solicitor in Perth in the end of 1843, since which time he has continued to carry on business, assisted for a number of years back by his son, Mr. R. M. Kippen. In 1849 Mr. Kippen married and had a family of eight, all of whom survive, with the exception of the eldest son. His wife predeceased him in 1882. At the time of his death Mr. Kippen was president of the Society of Solicitors for Perthshire and an elder in the Free West Church, and, taking an active interest in many public concerns in the city and county, was most thoroughly respected by all who knew him. Notes from Edinburgh. PARLIAMENT HOUSE, 29th July, 1891. THE dog days were hot and humid, but they were succeeded by a spell of hard, bracing weather. Both the hot and the hard days made us all sigh for a sight of blue hills or blue sea, and the breath of wild flowers and pine woods. Little wonder, therefore, that now, when the holiday season has set in, the streets, the clubs, the Courts should all be empty of their accustomed faces. The session has been singularly uneventful. It is below the average in the amount of business on the rolls, but it is without a parallel in the expedition with which cases have reached their final stage. Some idea of the prospects for the immediate future may be gathered from the fact that, a few days before the rising of the Court, the First Division had to transfer a dozen cases to the Second to give the Second employment during the first half of October. Such a condition of affairs has never hitherto occurred. Thirty years ago there were as many as three hundred cases awaiting argument. What would our snail predecessors say if they awoke from their long sleep? How much of our methods would they approve, and how much condemn ? To meet the exigency that threatens-no work for the judges -several suggestions have been made. One of them is to draft off some of their lordships to take jury trials set down for the sittings in session. There seems to be no reason why this should not be done, or why the Inner House judges should not devote themselves to jury trials and relieve the Outer House staff of all except proofs and procedure rolls? The misfortune is that if you go to the Inner House you cannot always count on getting the judge you want. Many people prefer the Outer House judges to any other for this purpose. They are all of them very popular in jury work. That cannot quite be said of the entire bench. The remark cuts two ways, perhaps, for if a judge is considered undesirable by one side he is sure to be very much desired by the other. It The July sittings eclipsed their predecessors in point of number of cases, but there was not a case of any moment except Sexton's, and it attracted a little notice only because of the absurd extent to which it was used as an advertisement. was no doubt a quasi-political case, but for all that few people cared a straw about Sexton or his reputation or the result of the trial, and the idea of giving it columns and columns of type each morning as if the parties concerned held the helm of state was really an insult to the intelligence of the public. The prominent features of the trial were some of the Dean's cross, a capital speech by Mr. Jameson, and the satirical replies of a Leith witness, of which the Dean was rather the victim. A peculiar point of some importance in practice arose in the First Division the other day. A petition was presented by John Yates, labourer, 60 Causewayend, Aberdeen, in which he stated that in September last he presented a petition in the Sheriff Court, Aberdeen, against William Robertson, farmer, Roadside, Balgowrie, for damages. Proof was led, and the shorthand writer who took part of the evidence stated that when he took his note-book home some children got access to it and tore out and destroyed the leaves containing the evidence. The petitioner asked the Court to empower the Sheriff-Substitute to re-take the lost evidence. This was opposed by the defender on the ground that when the evidence was led the pursuer's witnesses himself, his wife, and four children-broke down so completely that he, the defender, did not think it necessary to lead any proof, and it was not of the least importance to him to have as proof in the cause the evidence which the pursuer himself had led. As adminicles existed in the shape of a full newspaper report taken by shorthand reporters present at the time it was contended that the tenor of the proof should be established in this way, as the re-taking of the depositions of the pursuer's witnesses after an interval of six months would enable the witnesses to be prepared for the questions on which they formerly broke down. The Court granted the petition, the Lord President remarking that, as the witnesses were all alive, it was the proper and convenient course to re-take their depositions, although he was inclined to think the Sheriff-Substitute could have ordered that to be done without sending the parties to the Supreme Court at all. The case of Harris v. The North British Railway Company, decided in the beginning of the month, fixed the liability of carriers in a new direction, and one in which it was thought no liability need ever be anticipated. Harris is a Jew-not a moneylender, but an Israelite-and travelled in a company of Hebrews from Fife to Haymarket, where he was obliging enough to collect the tickets from his compatriots, and hand them to the official railway collector. Unfortunately, there happened a bona fide Jew amongst these honest men, and he had given a spurious ticket to Mr. Harris. The collector at once challenged Harris, and Harris was expelled from the carriage with contumely. He applied for compensation for this affront, but his demand was refused, and he accordingly brought this action for damages for ejection from the carriage and for injury to his feelings. The case was keenly fought by the Company, but they were beaten all along the line; and the advising was taken hold of by Lord Young to make a few incisive observations for the benefit of railway companies as keen and incisive and rational as any which he has administered to such bodies since the case of Wood v. The Caledonian Railway Company or Thom v. The Caledonian Railway Company five or six years ago. He said, for example, that it might be as well for shareholders to take note of the litigation, and in this view his lordship seems to coincide with the writers of numerous letters in the newspapers on another subject, namely, the promotion of bills in London by public companies. On the other hand, one must remember that, in regard to litigation, if great corporations did not show a resolute front they would be readily victimised by unscrupulous claimants. With reference to the promotion of new lines, one must remember that the public convenience is the leading relevant consideration to take note of. The announcement of Mr. Mark Davidson's appointment to Hamilton at the beginning of the month was received with an unprecedented amount of calm and concentrated swearing. have not heard it equalled except when the team of Liberal Advocates-Depute was announced in the year 1880. It is not that the appointee is incompetent or unpopular or distasteful in any manner of way-far from it: he is favourably known to every one of the few with whom he has been intimate, and will probably make an average county judge when he has had some experience in the application of legal principles to the affairs of life. But the questions one hears, or rather heard for time has already assuaged the pangs of disappointment-indicated very plainly that in point of discrimination and justice the Marquis of Lothian, who is supposed to be the perpetrator of such anomalies, has made a mess of his shrieval patronage. One would rather avoid personality in connection with such delicate matters, but the thing is getting beyond a joke, says Parliament House, and it would like to know whether political service or T |