v. Boston R. Co., 4 Am. Neg. Rep. 490. A team ster brought goods to the defendant's station for shipment, and while there lighted his pipe and threw the match under the station platform, where it set on fire rubbish, saturated with drippings from barrels of oil, and ignited several barrels of oil on the platform — and which had been there more than forty-eight hours, contrary to law — and then the platform, and thence communicated to and destroyed the plaintiffs premises on the opposite side of the street. It was held that the defendant was not responsible, the teamster not being in its employment, and the mere inflammability of the defendant's premises, although illegally caused, not being the original cause of the damages, and being too remote to render such a result probable or within reasonable foresight or con templation. The court cited, among cases that are somewhat to the contrary, one that shows that bears were dangerous in New Hampshire so recently as 1876 — Gilman v. Noyes, 57 N. H. 627, where the defendant carelessly left down the bars of plaintiff's pasture, and his sheep escaping, wandered away and were killed by bears. This seems about as unlikely to be foreseen as a consequence as anything that can be imagined, but the court approved a verdict, and held the defendant responsible. This, however, was away up in Coos County, the northernmost of the State, and bordering on Canada, where bears do prowl. The sheep were valued at $9.00 and the expense of hunting for them at $13.16, but there were six lawyers on the case and three judges wrote separate opinions. Ladd, J., was somewhat humor ous on this occasion, and said : — "Causa causantis eausa est eausati may be true, but it obviously leads into a labyrinth of refined and bewildering speculation whither the law cannot attempt to follow. This case furnishes an illustration. The jury say the sheep would not have been killed by bears but for their escape, and would not have escaped but for the bars being left down. But it is equally certain, without any finding of the jury, that they would not have been killed by the bears if the bears had not been there to do the deed; and how many antecedent facts the presence of the bears may in volve, each one of which bore a causative relation to the principal fact, sufficiently intimate so that it may be said the latter would not have occurred but for the occurrence of the former, no man can say. Suppose the bears had been chased by a hunter, at any indefinite time before, whereby a direction was given to their wanderings which brought them into the neighborhood at this particular time; suppose they were repulsed the night before in an attack upon the bee-hives of some farmer in a distant settle ment, and, to escape the stings of their vindictive pursuers, fled, with nothing but chance to direct their course, towards the spot where they met the sheep; suppose they were frightened that morning from their repast in a neighboring cornfield, and so brought to the place of the fatal encounter just at that particular point of time. Obviously, the num
ber of events in the history not only of those individual bears, but of their progenitors, clear back to the pair that, in instinctive obedience to the divine command, went in unto Noah in the ark, of which it may be said, but for this the sheep would not have been killed, is simply without limit. So the conduct of the sheep, both before and after their escape, opens a field for speculation equally profound and equally fruitless. It is easy to imagine a vast variety of circumstances without which they would not have made their escape just at the time they did, though the bars were down, or, having escaped, would not have taken the direc tion to bring them into the way of the bears just in season to be destroyed, as they were. Such a sea of speculation has neither shores nor bottom, and no such test can be adopted in drawing the uncertain line between conse quences that are actionable and those which are not." Surrender of Paternal Author1ty. — Most lawyers take their Bible, and most their Shakespeare, it is to be feared, at second-hand, and therefore when we come across pertinent quotations from them in their judicial opinions (possibly derived from the briefs of counsel), we like to reproduce them so that all the profession may read them. Just now we ran across the following, in Soper v. Guernsey, 71 Penn. St. 223: — "It is not an uncommon arrangement for a father to make a conveyance of his farm to one of his sons, in con sideration of being supported, nursed and attended during his life. The wisdom of such a contract is very question able, even where the most ent1re confidence is felt at the time in the affection of the child. The son of Sirach pro nounces emphatically against it : ' Give not thy son and wife, thy brother and friend, power over thee while thou livest, and give not thy goods to another, lest it repent thee, and thou entreat for the same again. As long as thou livest and hast breath in thee, give not thyself over to any. For better is it that thy children should seek to thee than that thou shouldst stand to their courtesy. In all thy works keep to thyself the preeminence; leave not a stain in thine honor. At the time when thou shalt end thy days and finish thy life distribute thine inheritance.' (Ecclesiastes xxxiii : 19-23.) The most striking illustration of the same thing is in the pathetic tragedy of Lear, where the fool confirms the opinion of the wise man of the Apocry pha : ' Would I had two coxcombs and two daughters. If I gave them all my living, I'd keep my coxcombs myself.'" There is, however, one argument in these days in favor of giving while living rather than leaving by will or to succession, — one may possibly thus evade the inheritance tax. Ca1n's Pun1shment. — In Turbeville v. State, 56 Miss. 798, commenting on the temporary absence of the judge from the bench during a trial, the court said : "We do not mean to say that be must actually listen to every word that falls from the lips of counsel while they are addressing the jury, for this might impose a burden too heavy to be borne."
