57 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and early history of institutions. I of course refer to the comparative 

 method, which Professor Freeman, one of its greatest expositors, says 

 mai'ks " a stage in the progress of the human mind at least as great as 

 the revival of Greek and Latin learning." This method had already 

 led to wonderful achievements in the fields of language and religion, 

 when Sir Henry Sumner Maine made the first noteworthy application 

 of it to legal history in his now famous " Ancient Law." The earliest 

 comparative study of European and Indian institutions was in the de- 

 partment of philology, and served to prove to demonstration that San- 

 skrit, Greek, Latin, and the Teutonic languages belonged to one com- 

 mon stock, and that the forefathers of Vergil and Sophocles, of the 

 authors of the "Vedas" and the " Nibelungenlied " were related by 

 community of race. This demonstration was soon followed by a great 

 mass of confirmatory proofs from the fields of mythology and reli- 

 gion, and all of this earlier work was absolutely requisite before any- 

 thing like a successful essay could be made in the field of comparative 

 jurisprudence so true is it, in the words of Mr. Symonds, that " lan- 

 guage and mythology form the vestibules and outer courts to Homer, 

 Phidias, and Lycurgus." The final preparation for a complete and 

 thorough study of comparative jurisprudence was made possible when 

 scholars like Mr. Tylor, Mr. Spencer, and Sir John Lubbock, went a 

 step beyond the facts furnished by Indo-European peoples, and showed 

 that prehistoric man was, to use the words of Mr. Bagehot, " substan- 

 tially a savage, like present savages, in morals, intellectual attainments, 

 and in religion," and that the prehistoric Aryan was no exception to 

 this rule. 



And now, before we define the scope and purpose of comparative 

 jurisprudence and there has been some doubt as to the propriety of 

 using this term in the sense in which I shall use it let us determine 

 exactly what is meant by the comparative method. For illustrations 

 and definitions, I might refer to Midler, Pictet, Freeman, and others 

 who have done so much for comparative science, but I turn by prefer- 

 ence to Professor Flint, because he has, in a single short paragraph, 

 most happily described the new method, particularly as applied to legal 

 history. " Social phenomena," says he, " such as laws, can not be ex- 

 plained by merely physical phenomena of natural philosophy and chem- 

 istry. The most distinct characteristics which they possess lie in their 

 capacities for continuous evolution and development ; and it is only 

 by the study of their evolution, by the comparison of their consecutive 

 states, and of each state with the coexisting general condition of soci- 

 ety, that we can rationally hope to reach an adequate knowledge of 

 their laws." This method, then, requires not only the study of Eng- 

 lish, ancient and modern Roman, Greek, and Hindoo law, but the study 

 of the history of each ; and not this alone, but the comparison of each 

 with all of the others in such manner as accurately to learn their rela- 

 tions to each other, and to be able to mark off with something of pre- 



