Editorial Department of possible duppies and other terrors of the darkness will venture out on a marauding expedition, will be deterred by any such trumpery expedients; but there is no doubt they have a wonderful efficacy. When some years back I was on a visit to Granada, where obeahism was apparently quite as rife as in Jamaica, a magistrate there seriously assured me that his small cocoa plantation was systematically robbed until he had somewhat ostentatiously called in the aid of a local obeahman. This professor solemnly perambulated through the plantation, hung up a bottle of rainwater here and there, in voked curses and other evils on any future thief, and from that moment the depreda tions ceased. "THE Teaching of Sir Henry Maine" is the subject of an inaugural lecture delivered at Oxford, March i. 1904, by Paul Vinogradorff, and printed in the April number of the Law Quarterly Review. After a keen analysis of Maine's conceptions and a review of the influences which acted upon him, the article continues: The topics which had the greatest attrac tion for Maine and those in regard to which his ideas, though contested and modified by later researches has been most fruitful, are, of course, the comparative history of kinship and of property in land. His views in this respect are so well known and so often quoted that I may be allowed to confine my self to mentioning his guiding principle, namely, that the development of law in this domain has to start not from the notion of the individual, of individual rights and duties, but from the notion of the group, first, the kindred, then the village community and ad mitting gradually and with considerable op position individual rights within its sphere. I may say once more that my object is not to analyse or criticize single doctrines, but to determine the points of view, and I think that even on the strength of our very brief survey we are entitled to state a few propositions as substantial in Maine's teaching, and, at the same time, as material for the conception of
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comparative jurisprudence even in its present state. 1 . The study of law is not merely a prep aration for professional duties and an intro duction to the art of handling professional problems. It may also be treated as a scien tific subject. 2. Two methods of scientific investigation may be applied to the study of law: the method of deductive analysis on the basis of abstractions from the present state of legal ideas and rules, and the method of inductive generalization on the basis of historical and ethnographical observations. 3. In the domain of inductive jurispru dence, law appears as one of the expressions of history, and history is taken in the wide sense of all knowledge as to the social evolu tion of mankind. 4. Insomuch, as every science ought to be directed to the discovery of laws, that is general principles governing particular cases, the historical method of jurisprudence is nec essarily a comparative one. I enumerate these articles not because they are new, but because I believe them to be true and am ready to subscribe them. They are comprehensive and efficient at the same time and ought to give a lead to many gen erations of searchers. IN the Michigan Law Review for May John C. Donnelly of the Detroit Bar discusses "One Phase of Federal Power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution"—that phase being the control of navigation —and considers especially the recent case of Scranton v. Wheeler, 179 U. S. 141, in which "the court, by a majority opinion, reached the conclusion that by virtue of its control of the navigable waters, the Federal Government might take possession of the bed of a stream where the water was too shallow for naviga tion, excavate a navigable channel through the same, mark the lateral lines thereof by permanent piers extending above the surface of the water, and of great length, and prevent the owner of the upland from enjoying his common law right of access to navigable
