OCT 181966 пс ке ᄌ 4141 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 559514 1.5 PREFACE. THE present volume is a collection of the decisions of the Courts of the Fourth Circuit on Admiralty subjects which are not included in the various reports of this Circuit already published. Some of the cases contained in this volume have previously appeared in print. The first six were selected from old numbers of Hall's Law Journal (a magazine long out of print and scarce), and a number of the remainder have appeared in the Federal Reporter. But it was nevertheless deemed advisable to insert them, so as to make the volumes of Hughes' Reports an epitome of the Federal decisions of the Circuit-the more so, as the facilities for prompt publication afforded by the Federal Reporter will render unnecessary the continuance of the present series. It is to be regretted that reporters have not hitherto adopted more frequently the plan of collecting Admiralty decisions into separate volumes. The practitioner who desires to make a specialty of Admiralty finds the law on the subject scattered through scores of volumes of Federal Reports, many of them scarce and all costly. He may frequently have to purchase an entire volume for the sake of a single case. Hence, until late years the decisions of one Circuit have been practically inaccessible to the Bench and Bar of another. The result has been a serious conflict of authorities on many points of Admiralty law. The comparative cheapness of the later Federal Reports as compared with the old, the increase of Association law |