rather than of the enunciation and application of legal principles. Some step should be taken for checking the amazing number of reports, which will be found a most serious evil in the administration of justice. The accumulation of reports becomes now so great a burden upon the student and the judge, that not only is the student unequal to the task of anything like collecting or arranging them, but the judge is in perpetual apprehension lest some conclusion derived by him from principles may be found to be at variance with some reported decision contained somewhere or other." Mr. Maconochie, a member of the Scotch bar, observes, "that it is too generally the case now for a practising lawyer to refer to preceding recorded cases, instead of, as during the last century, going up to first principles He does not get up now the length of first principles, because the multitude of decided cases to which he can refer is daily increasing. The effect of this is to make the profession one of technicalities, to be acquired by the exercise of the power of memory rather than a philosophy to be acquired by the development of the reasoning powers.' The Chief Remembrancer of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland observes that "A young man who obtains a good elementary knowledge of the philosophy of law will understand better the broad and more important principles on which the profession ought to rest. It will lead him to generalise, and not to be occupied altogether in finding cases out that have a leaning upon the point, without turning his mind to generalise, and to act upon principles instead of precedents. The want of that affects, to a very large extent, the practice of the bar itself, and induces them to refer to precedents and technicalities; so much so, that I find men succeeding at the bar every day by assiduity and a good memory in remembering names of cases, and being able to put them forward, who are very inferior, in my mind, in point of ability, to other men who do not get on so well. The habit of learning first the practice, and deducing the principles afterwards from the practice, has very much a tendency to narrow the mind; and I think the course at present is very much to learn the practice before they learn the principles at all; I mean that that is the general system of education."

Great number of reports. Reports in law and equity are multiplying so rapidly, that to keep pace with them is beyond the effort of the best memoria technica; and this very increase affords a further argument for substituting the principles of law as a science for the mere committing to memory of cases and precedents as the essential part of legal education. It was asked, in a late debate in the House of Lords, "Where are those streams-those fountains of justice to be found? Those fountains are contained in thirty-two quarto volumes of statutes, besides three times the number of private acts, filling in all thirty thousand quarto printed pages. The opera

tions of the working pure' lie in the decisions of the judges, who have no rules to guide them but such as they can make out by looking partly to the text-books, and partly to their own sense of what is known generally in the profession to be the law, but which has not yet been reduced into shape by text-writers. What is the number of volumes of these decisions? I speak only of the courts of common law. The following statement of the tomes of records of judicial legislation or decision-that mass which has been accumulating, not from the time that Mr. Murray had used the words at the bar which I have cited, not from the time that Lord Mansfield had acceded to the bench in 1756, but from the year 1786, when he left the bench-will be found partly correct. There are one hundred and sixty closely-printed bulky volumes of decisions; to which, if I added the Nisi Prius cases, I should make up one hundred and seventy volumes of decisions only of the three courts of common law at Westminster, without reckoning the courts of equity, or the courts of law in Ireland—that is, one hundred and fifty thousand pages of print, with all of which it becomes, and not only becomes but behoves, the judges and practitioners to be familiar. In fact, it is a mass of matter painful to mention, and frightful to contemplate. The expense, it must be obvious, of purchasing such a mass of books must be enormous; in fact, it is an expense which the student-at-law cannot compass. Then the books are continually on the increase ; in fact, they increase at compound interest. No fewer than fifty-nine learned lawyers are occupied in preparing reports, who send out in the shape of reports every year twelve or fourteen large volumes, which each barrister ought to possess, and each judge be familiar with, but which, continually increasing as the stream, defies any but a large fortune to purchase, any degree of memory to retain, any degree of perspicacity to disentangle." The noble lord might have added, in the words of Lipsius, "jurisprudentiam multorum camelorum onus esse Amelii vetus querela fuit. Quid nunc dicam ? Elephantos ab India adde, vix ferent." The great defect in legal education, as it now exists, is the want of system. The student reads in great measure at random, and occupies his time in committing to memory, in an undigested mass, much that he must unlearn as quickly as he can when he enters into the profession.

Knowledge of different steps in course of reading.-Of equal importance to the selection of proper books is the knowledge of what the student may expect to attain by each step he is about to take in the course pointed out to him. To know, beforehand, of what particular service each branch of his labour may be, and how far and in what manner it may be expected to advance him on his journey, is to obtain at once that great stimulus to exertion, an interesting object in view, without which reading will be comparatively unprofitable; and, for the want of which many zealous and indus

trious aspirants after legal fame, have, at the very threshold of the law, had their young energies damped or altogether extinguished. The student begins with contemplating what appears to him a very formidable array of bulky volumes, which are to form his future studies; he has courage, however, and resolves to fight a good fight, taking it for granted that as he has read upon other literary and scientific subjects, and understood tolerably what he was about, that he will have no great difficulty in comprehending all that is set down for his perusal in the study of the law. But he has not made his first progress through Blackstone (with or without a law dic.ionary at his elbow), without arriving at the mortifying conclusion that he has not only an immense amount of reading before him, but that he will have to labour through it all with the feeling that scarce one half of the words and sentences which impress themselves upon his weary eye ever reach the understanding, and that still fewer are stored in the memory.

Difficulties-Distinct objects in view.-It may be said that there needs no ghost to tell us there are difficulties in the study of the law; true-but the precise nature of those difficulties being once ascertained and admitted, the remedy suggests itself, and is easily applied. Although every mind differs in some respect from any other, and thus what forms a difficulty to one student is none to another, yet all the obstacles in the way of early progress are reducible to this one great head—namely, "the just appreciation by the student of each portion of his labour, and the proper expectations with which it is undertaken. This is the universal difficulty, differing with the instances only in degree. In other studies the scholar gradually feels his way: he is encouraged by the consciousness of his own improvement from the beginning; but in the law there are dark and desert regions to be passed, with scarce a glimmering ray of hope or sense of progress to enliven the path. In the study of the law the great discouragement is the want of some interesting and appreciable object distinctly in view in the early stages of our progress, and the consciousness of its acquirement. It is possible for the student himself to supply this desideratum; he may learn to make a just estimate of the value and probable result of each portion of the labour upon which he is engaged; but in this he ought to be assisted by the practitioner.

Distingui hing real differences - Explanations.-His first rule should be not to harass his mind in the beginning by attempting too critical or nice a comprehension of what he reads; and, secondly, that he should receive the ideas conveyed to his understanding with a reservation for subsequent correction; thirdly, that as in the course of his studies he finds occasion to correct his former notions, and discriminate between instances and cases which before seemed to be homogeneous, instead of desponding and supposing his previous

reading, therefore, to have been useless, he should learn to consider these the only sure tests of his own advancement in knowledge; instead of labouring perpetually under the apprehension that because he is continually correcting his former impressions he is making little or no progress, or not so great a progress as others, let him be convinced, we repeat, that these corrections are the sure evidences of his success. As the great mental faculty called into operation in the study of the law is the power of distinguishing the real differences of cases, so as to know to which principle and rule of law each may belong, it almost follows as a corollary that the more we learn the more we have to except and distinguish from our first rude impressions of general principles. It generally happens that whilst the law student is reading elementary works he is also practically engaged in the minor parts of the business of an attor ney's office, or counsel's chambers, and it is impossible for him for some time to understand the why and the wherefore of all that he sees and does; but he must not neglect his steady course of reading for the sake of hunting up with too great inquisitiveness an explanation for all that comes within his observation in the hours of practice. Let him at first seek such explanations by way of relaxation, and as auxiliary only to his regular study, with a care not to follow them so far as to confuse or weary himself. The principal benefit derived from such researches, at first, is not so much an increased knowledge of points of law as of books; and there is nothing of greater importance to the student than an early acquirement of a general knowledge of law books, or a facility of at once laying his hand upon the best authority upon any particular branch or point of law. He should be gradually attaining this knowledge of books and authorities by occasional searches for explanation of points occurring in practice, whilst he is steadily following a fixed course of reading; but for some length of time he must be very cautious how he allows himself to believe that he has laid in much store of information, which will not require subsequent correction. By and by he has acquired some general idea of the meaning of the terms of technical language, his reading ceases to be quite such ploughing work as before, and he does not stick at each word for a recollection of its individual sense, and then proceed by a slow process or combination to ascertain the meaning of the whole sentence.

Familiarising the mind with technical knowledge.-Still, at this stage you can hardly call the study very interesting; the labour for the production of each grain of knowledge is too great; and the genuineness of the treasure, when obtained, is too uncertain to give the scale the pleasurable preponderance. But let the student only have faith, and believe that in this manner he is so disciplining his mind, so arming his memory, and acquiring such habits of patient inquiry, that shortly he will be almost suddenly astonished by

the realisation of all his hopes. He will now read with a mind so familiarised with the technical language, in which alone legal ideas can be concisely expressed, that the contrast of his present facility with his past difficulty will be a constant spring of pleasure, and henceforward as he ventures to swim into the deeper waters of the law, and plunges into more abstruse writings, his delight will be increased beyond measure to find that his powers of apprehension have become quickened and improved in proportion to the growing difficulty of his subject He now begins to be sensible of acquiring permanent knowledge of the law; he has issued from the state of mere preparation, and has a comparatively flowery path before him. Law dictionaries. It is usual to recommend students to make use of a law dictionary, and if this be confined to the explanation of terms occurring in the course of reading it may not be objectionable. We think, however, that a commencing student will not derive much benefit from a dictionary thus used; and if he is reading proper books he ought not to require such extraneous assistance. It would be different if the student were reading abstruse works, such as Coke's Institutes or Sheppard's Touchstone, without any previous preparation. Our notion of dictionaries is, that to be useful they should present a considerable amount of information, and be, in fact, substitutes for treatises. But, if not of this character, they should be confined to a mere explanation of terms, without any attempt at the application of the law. Some of the old works on study afford an example of what we allude to, such as Doddridge's English Law, specimens of which may be seen in 5 Law Chron, pp. 72-78; 109-113; 183-186. We have mentioned some of the law dictionaries in "Directions for the Study of the Law," pp. 5-8. We may here mention that the most modern are Wharton's Lexicon and Holthouse's Dictionary. They are both second editions, the price of the former being 25s., that of the latter 12s. Mr. Wharton's book professes to be the more complete of the two; but it contains very much matter not required by the student, such as explanations of terms in the civil law and in medical jurisprudence, some of these articles being extended beyond what could be expected or desired. Mr. Holthouse's work is not correct in those letters relating to equity and conveyancing, but is satisfactory in the subjects relating to common law. We commenced a dictionary which proceeded to the title of "decree " only, when it was discontinued, and, we fear, without any prospect of being further continued. It can be had separately, done up in stiff cover, with a title-page, and contains 184 pages, in double columns. Not being a complete work the price is 3s. 6d only.

Every position of the author to be understood.-Instead of passing over difficulties met with in reading, as at first recommended in some degree to be done, the very reverse must now be the student's