Trial before Mr. Justice Hodgins, L.J.A., who held, that in cases of collision the active and vigilant services of the man on the lookout, under circumstances when those propelling the ship necessarily rely upon him, are indispensable and necessary.

2. When two vessels are to blame for inflicting damage on a third vessel they are jointly liable for the whole damage, and where, as in this case, the action is in personam, the defendants, the owners of the ships, are jointly liable.

In this case the expression "one ship" was discussed and in this connection the remarks of Lord Watson in the case of the Niobe (1891), A. C. 401, at page 407, were cited, as well as the cases of S.S. Alexander Shukoff v. Gothland (1921), 1 A. C. 216, where the language of Lord Shaw of Dunfermline is reported.

HODGINS, L.J.A.

Judgment for plaintiff.

EXCHEQUER COURT OF CANADA.

Toronto Admiralty District.

April 24th, 1923.

LAKES AND ST. LAWRENCE TRANSIT COMPANY, PLAINTIFF v. NIAGARA, ST. CATHARINES AND TORONTO RAILWAY COMPANY, DEFENDANT. Shipping-Collision-Negligence by failure to use best means provided in view of circumstances immediately preceding accident-Effect of Rules of Railway Board-Error of judgment.

This was an action in personam for damages by the plaintiff against the defendant, which occurred by reason of a bridge, controlled and operated by defendant over the old Welland Canal, swinging back while open to permit the passage of one of plaintiff's vessels and the supervening accident which occurred by reason thereof.

Trial before Mr. Justice Hodgins, L.J.A., who held, that where the circumstances and conditions existing immediately prior to the time of the happening of a collision suggest extreme caution and promptitude, and effective use of the best means which had been provided for preventing an accident such as occurred was not made, this can not be deemed to be a mere C.B.R.-VOL. I.-45a

error of judgment, but negligence and want of reasonable forethought must be inferred.

The Rules made by the Railway Commissioners on May 8th, 1914, with respect to the passage of vessels through bridges on the old Welland Canal, are not warranted by the terms of sections 30 and 232 of the Railway Act then in force. If they were to be regarded as binding, a breach thereof would not involve a presumption of blame under Canadian Admiralty Law, and the fact that the breach caused or contributed to an accident would have to be proved.

With reference to the authority of the Rules of the Board of Railway Commissioners and their interpretation, the Judge says that they seem to indicate a change of law since Turner v. G. W. Railway Co., 6 U. C. C. P. 536. And on the question of the presumption of blame under the Canadian Admiralty Law by reason of a breach of a rule, the cases of Fraser v. S.S. Aztec (1920), 19 Ex. C. R. 454 and George Hall Co. v. S.S. Parks Foster (1923), Ex. C. R. 56 were referred to.

This point was also considered in the case of George Hall Coal Co. against the Steamer Maplehurst, where Maclennan, J., held that the proof of the breach of the collision Regulations cast the burden of proof upon the infringing vessel to establish that such breach did not cause or contribute to the collision. This judgment was affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada, 1923 S. C. R. 507; but although this question was raised in the factums by counsel it does not seem to have been discussed by the judges of the Supreme Court.

Judgment for plaintiff.

EXCHEQUER COURT OF CANADA.

Quebec Admiralty District.

MACLENNAN, L.J.A.

October 2nd, 1923. HARRIS ABATTOIR CO. v. SS. ALEDO AND OWNERS.

Shipping -Jurisdiction The Admiralty Act, 1861, sec. 6

Goods carried out of Canada-Action for damage thereto-
Practice.

On July 7th plaintiff delivered a quantity of cheese to the steamship A. at Montreal for shipment to Copenhagen. The

ship did not sail until the 19th, and plaintiff claimed that, owing to this delay, the cheese was damaged by exposure and heat and by failure of the defendant to protect it. To avoid further loss the cheese was removed from the vessel and a new lot of cheese shipped. Action was brought for the loss thereby occasioned.

Held, that although section 6 of the Admiralty Court Act, 1861 (applicable to Canada), is to be liberally construed, the jurisdiction it confers upon the Court is clearly confined to cases of damage to goods carried by ships into a Canadian port, and does not extend to the case of goods shipped from Canada to foreign ports.

2. That a mere technical objection to an informality or irregularity in procedure may be waived by appearance, by the giving of bail or by taking a step in the action; but if in fact the Court has no jurisdiction over the subject matter of the claim, no delay on the part of the defendant, and no step in the action taken by him can give the Court jurisdiction.

Action dismissed.

RECENT LITERATURE.

Publishers desiring reviews or notices of Books and Periodicals must send copies of the same to the Editor, care of THE CARSWELL COMPANY, LIMITED, 145 Adelaide Street West, Toronto, Canada.

Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence. Vol. 2. (Jurisprudence

of the Greek City). By Sir Paul Vinogradoff, F.B.A., Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Oxford. Oxford University Press. Humphrey Milford,

1922.

In this volume of his latest important enterprise in the field of juridical scholarship, Professor Vinogradoff restricts his investigations to the Greek Jurisprudence of the epoch when democracy prevailed in the leading cities of Greece, the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. He makes no attempt to survey Greek positive law in all its bearings.

The book is well worth the great pains the author has apparently taken over its content, if only because it consigns to the limbo of discarded error the notion so lately prevalent that Jurisprudence, as we understand the term, dates its beginnings in the period when the opinions of jurisconsults first became recognized sources of law in Imperial Rome, roughly speaking, about the beginning of the Christian era. The truth is that the Roman genius was so essentially practical, and such was its native poverty on the purely theoretical side of things, that it was obliged to borrow from Greece the foundations of its system of legal science. For this purpose Roman lawyers went to the Stoic philosophy. Now the Stoics summed up the whole duty of man in the formula: Act according to Nature. The Roman jurists seized upon this "law of nature as identical with that which they called the jus gentium-not only a violent inference, but an absurd one. All this is manifest in the passage from Ulpian found in the Institutes of Justinian, where the law of nature is confounded with the instinct of animalsa "howler" which no doubt would make Rignano stare and gasp. It has been well said that the law of nature as it appears in the legal writings of the Romans is a sort of intellectual garnish, illustrating nothing and explaining nothing.

وو

Profesor Vinogradoff thus explains his method of presenting the Jurisprudence of the Greek City:

"We shall have to concentrate on certain periods and abstain from an attempt to account for all details. We are

not concerned either with the tribal beginnings of Greek law, or with its exuberant growth in Hellenistic times, although now and then a principle established in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. may be well illustrated from late inscriptions or papyri. But we must renounce all systematic exposition of the complex legal currents of Hellenistic civilization, and as for the institutions of ancient Greece, they have already been referred to on some occasions in the volume on Tribal Law. It is the inscriptions, the speeches, the historical and philosophical writings of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C. that form the main basis for our study."

Those who resort to the book will find in chapter 6, "The City and the Citizen " and also in chapter 7, "The Law of the Constitution," most interesting expositions of the privileges of individual citizens, and of societies and unions in the ancient Greek polis, as well as material throwing much light on the origins of civic administration and the deliberative functions of the people in our modern democracies. In chapter 8 the genesis of International Law is discussed, and in chapter 9 the Greek notions of punitive law (crime and tort), are examined in a luminous way. In the remaining chapters (10 and 11), the law of property and of contracts and obligations is given with much scholarly detail.

C. M.

Publications of the Permanent Court of International Justice. Acts and Documents relating to Judgments and Advisory Opinions given by the Court. Series C., No. 1 (1st Ordinary Session, 1922); No. 2 (2nd Extraordinary Session, 1923); Series D., No. 3 (Extracts from International Agreements affecting the Jurisdiction of the Court). A. W. Sijthoff's Publication Co., Leyden, World Peace Foundation, Boston, 1923.

These volumes, embracing in all some eleven hundred royal octavo pages, illustrate the already immense and the ever increasing amount of labour involved in the administration of business in the Permanent Court of International Justice. To print the records of the Court in two languages, French and English, is a vastly expensive enterprise, but we imagine the cost is justified by the demands of publicity for this Court of world-wide importance. All literate mankind is interested in what the Court is doing and would like to read about it. The volumes before us are excellently printed; but but we should like to see them better indexed. C. M.