however to be found in any general technicality in administering the law or in an over-strict adherence to rules of evidence. The rules of evidence in India which regulate admissibility are wider than in England, and local judges err more in admitting what should be rejected than in rejecting what ought to be admitted. The true cause is to be found in the want of skilled preparation of cases for trial. The police have little detective ability, and they do not understand what evidence is legally necessary or admissible. Their mode of procedure is to adopt a theory, not unfrequently a very astute one, and then mould the evidence to support this theory, too often manufacturing a necessary link when it cannot otherwise be supplied. When anything transpires in the course of the trial to raise a suspicion that the evidence has been tampered with, the whole case including the sound portions of the evidence is not uncommonly sacrificed in the minds of judge and jury to this suspicion. Frequently also essential facts, which could have been properly proved by legal evidence if the case had been prepared under skilled supervision, are not proved at all, or are sought to be proved by inadmissible evidence, the result being the escape of criminals who would have been convicted under a sounder system of preparation. Manifestly these failures of justice are due to the action, not of the Courts who can proceed only upon the evidence brought before them, but of those who are charged with the duty of collecting the materials which constitute evidence. This duty is cast mainly upon the police without legal advice or assistance, and beyond question the police are not strong enough for its performance. There is in each district a functionary called the Government Pleader, who undertakes the conduct of Crown cases in the Court of Session. He is not, however, consulted in the preparation of these cases. He receives his brief just before the trial commences, and he has to make the best of the materials sent him by the police and a committing magistrate, too often inexperienced and too often overwhelmed with executive work, upon the doing of which his advancement and promotion mainly depend. The Government of Bengal has had its attention drawn to this unsatisfactory state of things and to the necessity for some reform through which the collection of evidence in serious cases and their preparation for trial may be conducted under proper advice and supervision in the districts. In the Presidency towns, it may be observed, a proper system exists, and the different results of cases there tried furnish one of the strongest arguments for reform in the districts. The Government receives a large surplus revenue from the Courts; and some small portion of this surplus ought to be applied to effect a very necessary improvement in the administration of justice by providing legal assistance and proper supervision in the preparation of Crown cases for trial. If this reform were efficiently carried out, failures of justice would become rare; the police would become more efficient and less corrupt; and cases like that of Muluk Chand would cease to disfigure the annals of the administration of criminal justice in Bengal. C. D. F.

The Forest of Essex: its History, Laws, and Administration and Ancient Customs, and the Wild Deer which lived in it. By WILLIAM RICHARD FISHER. London: Butterworths. 1887. La. 8vo. viii and 448 pp. MR. FISHER was one of the Counsel for the Corporation of London in the great suit of Commissioners of Sewers v. Glasse (L. R. 19 Eq. 134), in which the Commissioners, as owners of some 200 acres of land, part cemetery, part farm, at Wanstead, successfully attacked the inclosures effected by

sixteen lords of manors within the Forest of Epping, and acquiesced in by the Crown, to whom the forest rights belonged. To this suit the book before us owes its origin, and it was desirable that the mass of ancient records collected by the advisers of the Corporation should find some more attractive repository than an old brief. Mr. Fisher's pages bear constant traces of this professional origin. It is natural for the advocate of the Corporation to ascribe the preservation of Epping Forest to the exertions and the sole cost of the Corporation,' even though a little before we read that the expense to the Corporation was defrayed out of the grain duty levied on all grain imported into London, and appropriated by Act of Parliament to the exclusive purpose of preservation of open spaces. And documents not capable of being put in evidence in the great suit appear not to have attracted much of Mr. Fisher's attention. He is aware of the existence of the Domesday of St. Paul's, as we gather from one reference, but he gives no other sign that it contains a full and interesting account of the condition of the manors in and near the forest held by St. Paul's in the early part of the thirteenth century. He hardly does justice to the curious change of public opinion in the last century, since the Essex reporter of the Board of Agriculture wrote, "The forests of Epping and Hainault are viewed as an intolerable nuisance,' to the day when the 'intolerable nuisance' of the forest of Epping has been preserved to the people for ever by statute. He omits to notice that the 'assarts,' or breaking up of forest land for tillage, though offences in the royal forests, are perfectly recognised in other early manors, where the revenues derived from them form an important part of the Extenta Manerii. Curiously enough, in the chapter on Pannage he does not deal otherwise than by an indirect reference with the discussion of that obscure subject contained in the case of Chilton v. Corporation of London (L. R. 7 Ch. D. 562, 735), in which indeed he was counsel. And perhaps he is a little too leuient on the miserably narrow view of the position and duties of the Crown shown by the Government department responsible for the Crown rights in the Forest, which was all but successful in sacrificing the magnificent open space of to-day to the most petty economy and money-getting.

With these reservations, the author has compiled a very interesting and valuable work. It is hardly so picturesque as the subject would justify. A certain Roger Deus salvet dominas lights up a dreary number of names with his quaint appellative, and the chapter on the Forest deer, with the great destruction that fell on them in 1489 when they were 'devoured with swyn and slayn with curres and smeten with arrowes and dede of murreyn' to the number of over 300, is interesting; but one feels that the author might have made a more readable book if his attention had not first been drawn to the matter by his brief. Still to the student of our early institutions these pages will furnish abundant interest. If to old courts the Reeve and four men from each township came, in the forest we find the Reeve and 'his assistants the Fourmen' flourishing in the last century. If in the manor of Domesday we find bordarii and cotarii, we have in the Forest the 'cottagers' continually appearing, and in the seventeenth century we read of the 'borderers.' If we learn in Mr. Seebohm's pages of the three great open fields of the township, we have to this day the common meads at Waltham in several strips part of the year, some of freehold, some of copyhold tenure, and common to all ratepayers, or to all landowners in the field for the rest of the year. In short, this book provides abundant materials for making the dry bones of past records live, even if its own pages might with advantage have been more enlivening. T. E S.

The Law and Practice of Petition of Right under the Petitions of Right Act, 1860. By WALTER CLODE. London: William Clowes & Sons. 1887. 8vo. xi and 264 pp.

THE author in his preface craves a lenient judgment on his work as being the first to deal with this branch of the law; but an examination of it, we think, proves that it stands in need of no special indulgence.

The first three chapters are devoted to the nature and origin of petitions of right; the next nine discuss the various cases in which this remedy is available; while the remainder of the work deals with practice. The Petitions of Right Act of 1860 supplied a new system of procedure so much more convenient than the old that the latter, though in no way repealed, has been in fact superseded by the new. Hence the portion of the work devoted to practice consists chiefly of a commentary on the statute itself. But inasmuch as the Act, while thus providing an alternative procedure, in no respect modified the substantive law, the limits of the remedy must still be sought in precedents ancient and modern, and it is consequently important for the determination of the various questions which may arise to be acquainted with the ancient origin of these petitions.

I. Nature and Origin of Petitions of Right.-In the first chapter the author discusses, without attempting to solve, the question of the origin of the petition of right, and presents in a clear tabulated form the evidence in favour of the two rival theories, (i) that by an express enactment of Ed. I it was substituted for an ancient right of action against the Crown; and (ii) that by reason of there never having been a right of action against the Crown, redress of whatever character was of necessity sought by petition. The second chapter traces the history of petitions of right back to the early days when the King in Council performed the functions alike of legislator, executive, and judge; and by numerous citations from the various petitions which have been published in the Rotuli Parliamentorum illustrates the classification of petitions which gradually took place as the various departments of state with their special functions were in process of time evolved from the Council. The petitions which remained after the High Court of Parliament, the Exchequer, the various tribunals for the administration of law and equity, and the Privy Council in its several chambers had absorbed those which fell within their respective jurisdictions were denominated Bills of Grace. These remained unchanged; they were still baillez au Roy mesmes'; answered by the King himself in the same terms, and made the subject still of commissions issued to investigate the suppliant's title before being handed over for trial to a court of law,-a genuine relic of the old practice of petition to the King and his Council, deriving its name, as the author with much probability contends, from the ordinary form of royal response endorsed on the petition, soit Droit fait als parties.' There is no more interesting problem in the history of our law than this of the gradual differentiation of that great organ of government known as the King in Council-an interest that is none the less that the investigation is not without a practical bearing on modern theories, although unfortunately many of the details are veiled from us by the mists of ages. Where so much is uncertain it is difficult to arrive at indisputable conclusions on matters of detail; but Mr. Clode has set forth with admirable clearness so much of the old state of things as is necessary for the discussion of practical questions which may depend on the ancient theory and doctrine of this form of remedy.

II. Where a Petition will lie. The author next treats in successive

chapters of the persons to and by whom petitions of right may be sued, and the courts which have jurisdiction to entertain them. Several more are then devoted to a discussion of the various cases in which such petitions will and will not lie, both at common law and in equity. The authorities appear to have been very thoroughly searched from the Year Books down to recent cases reported in the Weekly Notes and the Times newspaper; while the early instances of petitions contained in the Rotuli Parliamentorum and other sources which were not treated as of authority by such fathers of the law as Broke and Fitzherbert and the compilers of the Year Books have been wisely omitted.

The author discusses clearly and with judgment the numerous moot points which the subject presents: such are the questions whether a petition abates by the death of the Sovereign, whether subjects can sue jointly, whether the right of suit is assignable, and whether a petition can be sued where the remedy of Monstrans is available. At p. 52 he adopts with approval, as stating the true doctrine, the opinion expressed by the Court in Feather v. The Queen, 6 B. & S. 294, namely, that a petition of right, unlike a petition addressed to the grace and favour of the Sovereign, is founded on a violation of some right in respect of which, but for the immunity from all process with which the law surrounds the person of the Sovereign, a suit at law or equity could be maintained.' Yet at p. 63 he says, 'It cannot be too constantly borne in mind that the rights which the subject has against the Crown are entirely different to, and independent of, those which he has against his fellow-subjects; and further, that the test by which it can be decided whether any particular claim of a subject's against the Crown can be maintained is not its legal sufficiency considered as a claim against a subject, but the foundation in precedent which it has considered as a claim against the Crown.' Putting aside cases of the Crown's immunity based (as in the case of torts) on special rules of law, it is difficult to reconcile these two points of view, and if the principle laid down by the author is correct, as in strict theory it probably is, the proposition stated in Feather v. The Queen, which is not of a merely negative character, must be regarded as a generalisation expressing not exactly what the law then was, but at any rate what it was desirable that it should be, and what in fact it has continually tended to become.

At p. 164 the author cites and discusses the case of Irwin v. Grey (3 F. & F. 635), where a suppliant, to whose petition a fiat had been refused by the Crown on the advice of the Home Secretary, unsuccessfully sued the minister for not submitting' the petition to the Crown within the true meaning of the Act. And on the next page the author submits that the granting of the "fiat" is a purely voluntary act, and that the Crown cannot be compelled to grant it.' It would, however, have been interesting to have had the author's views on the limits, legal or constitutional, which hedge a minister in submitting or advising upon a petition of right-whether, for instance, he may decline to submit a petition which is 'frivolous and vexatious,' and whether, on the other hand, he can be rendered responsible legally or constitutionally if he refuses to submit or gives erroneous advice upon a petition which is well founded.

In no part of his book does the author better exhibit his thorough comprehension of his subject than in the chapter relating to claims for breaches of contract. His contention is that the decision in Thomas v. The Queen (L. R. 10 Q. B. 31), which laid down upon the authority of the Banker's Case (14 State Trials, 1) that a petition of right will lie for a breach of contract resulting in unliquidated damages, was erroneous through misap

prehension chiefly of Lord Somers' judgment in that case. It is impossible to give here the author's most interesting and able argument, which is necessarily elaborate in proportion to that which it seeks to displace. It is difficult to suppose that a principle which has since been so extensively acted on alike in England and in other parts of the Empire, and which provides a remedy in precisely that class of cases which, as the author points out, appears to have led to the revival of these petitions after 250 years of almost total disuse, will ever be successfully questioned; but the author is none the less successful in convincing us that his criticism is entirely justified by the authorities existing at the time of the decision. Nothing indeed is more striking than the looseness of ideas which appears to have been entertained in regard to many parts of the subject. This is well exposed by the author in his chapter on petitions of right in Equity, in which he shows that prior to the Statute of 1860 there was no authority for a genuine petition of right being sued in Equity. He does not, however, consider the effect of the Judicature Act of 1873 in this connection; yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, however the matter may have stood prior to 1875, the combined effect of secs. 16 and 34 of the Act of 1873, and of sec. 7 of the Petitions of Right Act has been to confer on the Chancery Division a valid title to the jurisdiction it has been in the habit of exercising in this respect.

III. Procedure. The part devoted to practice has been executed with the same skill and completeness as the rest of the work. It consists of a full commentary on the statute in which all the cases are discussed which throw light on matters of procedure. This is followed by the statutory schedule of forms and two appendices containing (i) the Return of all petitions of right presented and fiated by Her Majesty under the statute down to 1876, showing in each case the suppliant's name, the subject-matter of the petition and the result of the proceedings; and (ii) the laws regulating proceedings by petitions of right in Ireland, Scotland and certain colonies and dependencies.

We have observed a few errors in printing, comprising one or two mistakes in references, which should be corrected in a subsequent edition. But the book as a whole is an excellent piece of work, and is an example of the way in which one of the most intractable parts of our law can acquire a greatly increased interest by being reduced to clearness and order.

The Principles of Equity: a Treatise on the system of Justice administered in Courts of Chancery. By GEORGE TUCKER BISPHAM. Fourth Edition. Philadelphia, Pa.: Kay & Brother. 1887. 8vo. lxxxvi and 659 pp.

It is a sufficient testimony to the excellence of Professor Bispham's work that his treatise on the Principles of Equity has in thirteen years reached a fourth edition. That a book of this scope and magnitude should attain so wide a popularity speaks well alike for the perspicuity of the writer and the intelligence of the reader. Where the bulk of the work is so good, it may seem ungracious to criticise. But there are some details which would bear amendment, such for instance as the amorphous heading in the index, Waltham, John De, erroneously supposed to have invented the subpoena,' and the description of the plaintiff in Tyrrell v. The Bank of London (10 H. L. Cas. 28), who was in fact a solicitor, as a member of the bar, whose