961 



BARRISTER, 



BARTER. 



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The advocates of the College of Justice form an incorporation called 

 the Faculty of Advocates. All matters relating to the body are regu- 

 lated by the vote of the whole members, . and there is no governing 

 council resembling that of the benchers of the English Inns of Court. 

 The president of the body is called the Dean of Faculty, and is elected 

 by general vote. He has precedence in court after the Lord Advocate 

 for the tune being, and before the Solicitor-General. No other prece- 

 dence is recognised, except that of seniority. But by a recent resolu- 

 tion the Faculty has resolved- of courtesy to permit those who have held 

 the offices of Lord Advocate and Solicitor-General to have precedence 

 next after the Lord Advocate, Dean of Faculty, and Solicitor-General 

 for the time. But only the actual Lord Advocate and Solicitor-General 

 plead within the bar. The Faculty regulates all matters connected 

 with admission to the bar. 



Till the institution of the Court of Session in the beginning of the 

 16th century, no course or exhibition of legal learning appears to 

 have been required to qualify for the legal profession in Scotland. 

 At first indeed no legal qualification was necessary even for the Scottish 

 bench. The first advocates were mostly, if not all, ecclesiastics, con- 

 versant with the canon and civil laws ; and, till the Union with 

 England, a knowledge of these laws was the chief requisite to admission 

 to the Scottish bar. Indeed, till the above era, there was no provision 

 for the study of the law in Scotland, except the canon and civil law 

 chairs of the universities ; and accordingly it was usual till our own 

 day to prepare for the Scottish bar at some one of the foreign colleges ; 

 of which those of France and Italy were the most frequented, till the 

 lustre of the Cujacian school in the Low Countries, aiding the con- 

 nection which arose between Scotland and them at the Reformation, 

 drew the student thither. In 1722, however, a chair of Scots Law was 

 erected at Edinburgh ; and there are now several law professorships in 

 the different universities of Scotland. 



From the year 1610, it has been imperative on all candidates for 

 admission to the bar in Scotland to pass an examination in law. In the 

 year 1 750 it was required that this examination should be both upon 

 the civil law and the law of Scotland. A further extension of the 

 course of study was made in 1854, when an examination, or the pro- 

 duction of other evidence of proficiency in several branches of general 

 learning, was directed, prior to the examination in law. These pre- 

 liminary qualifications are as follows : 



The degree of M.A. of any Scottish university, of the University of 

 London, or of the Queen's University in Ireland, or the degree 

 of B.A. of the English universities, or such degree of a foreign 

 university as may be evidence of the same amount of scholarship 

 as the degree of M.A. in Scotland. 



In the event of the candidate not having graduated as above, he 

 must undergo an examination on the following subjects and books, 



1. Latin. ' Cicero de Oratore,' and the ' Odes' of Horace, or in place 



of Horace, the first six books of the ' ^Eneid.' 



2. Greek. First six books of the ' Iliad,' or Herodotus's ' History." 



In place of the Greek, the candidate may select any two 



of the modern languages subjoined : 

 German. Schiller's ' Geschichte des Abfalls des Vereinigten Nie- 



derlande, &c.,' and Schiller's ' Historical Dramas.' 

 French. Guizot'a ' Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe,' and 



a Satire of Boileau. 

 Italian. Beccaria, ' Dei Delittie e delle Pene/ and a Tragedy of 



Alfieri. 

 Spanish. Cervantes, ' Don Quixote,' and Yriarte, ' Fabulas 



Literarias.' 



3. Logic. Whately's ' Logic.' 



In place of Logic the candidate may select 

 Mathematics. First six books of Euclid. 



4. Ethical and Metaphysical Philosophy. Reid's Works by Hamil- 



ton, and Sir J. Mackintosh's ' Dissertation on Progress of Ethical 

 Philosophy.' 



A year after passing this examination, the candidate may present 

 himself for examination in law. But for a year prior to the examina- 

 tion in law, he must not have engaged in any trade, business, or pro- 

 fession, either on his own account or in the employment of another. 

 And he must have attended, during at least one session, a class of 

 civil law in a university, and during another session a class of Scots 

 law in a university ; and attended during one session a class of convey- 

 ancing, or during a second session, either of the classes first mentioned ; 

 and lastly, he must have attended a course of lectures on medical 

 jurisprudence. 



The examination on civil law is appointed to be on the ' Institutes 

 of Justinian,' with Warnkceuig ' Inst. Jus. Rom. Privat. ;' and the 

 title of the Pandects ' De div. reg : juris ' (lib..!, tit. vii.) with the Com- 

 mentary contained in the 45th title of the 4th book of Bankton's 

 ' Institute of the Law of Scotland.' The examination on the Scottish 

 Idw is appointed to be on Bell's ' Principles.' 



If the examination is successfully passed, a title of the Pandects is 

 assigned to the candidate as the subject of a thesis in Latin. Unfor- 

 tunately it is not required that the thesis should be actually, as it is 

 nominally, of the candidate's own composition, and this is con- 

 sequently, what no other part of the examination is, a mere formality. 

 When the thesis has been approved, the candidate is presented to the 

 Court of Session, by which he is formally admitted as an advocate. 



ARTS AND SCI. DIV. VOL. I. 



The fees on admission amount to about 350Z. ; the greater part of 

 which goes to the support of the magnificent library belonging to the 

 Faculty. 



Among the curious trifles of which the memory is still preserved by 

 antiquaries, is the right claimed by the Scottish bar to remain covered 

 in the presence of the court. Thus we find that Alexander Seton, 

 afterwards Lord Chancellor of Scotland, " made his public lesson of the 

 law before James VI., the Senators of the College of Justice, and 

 Advocates present, in the Chapel Royal of Holyrood House, in his 

 lawyer-gown and four-nooked cap (as lawyers used to pass their tryals 

 in the Universities abroad), to the great applause of the king and all 

 present ; after which he was received by the College of Justice as ane 

 lawyer. " And so, when King Charles removed Oliphant, King's Advo- 

 cate, from the bench, and issued an ordinance that no officer of state 

 should for the future have the place of an ordinary lord there, the 

 Court of Session passed an act of Sederunt, acknowledging the right of 

 his assistant and successor, Hope, King's Advocate, to plead covered. 

 This, it is indeed said, was a privilege granted to Hope personally, in 

 consideration of his having a son, or as some say two sons, and others, 

 who not content with one or two, roundly assert three sons on the bench, 

 who like the other judges sat with the hat on. But the fact is, Hope had 

 no son on the bench when the act of Sederunt referred to was passed, 

 nor for six years afterwards ; and the acknowledgment then made 

 was renewed to Sir Thomas Nicholson, King's Advocate, with other 

 known privileges of the office of King's Advocate. We therefore 

 take the act of Sederunt to contain recognition of a right common to 

 the whole faculty, and made to the King's Advocate as the head of the 

 body under the bench. That the judges wore their hats on the bench 

 till recent times is certain ; and at admissions to the bar the hat is 

 to this day placed on the bar of the court in assertion of the right of 

 the candidate. A general parity indeed prevails between the bench and 

 bar : the King's Advocate and others were long members of both bench 

 and bar ; anct in former times, when the judges were removable at 

 pleasure, if a judge was removed from the bench he resumed hia 

 practice at the bar. This, for example, President Balfour did, on hia 

 removal from the chair. 



BARROW. [TUMULUS.] 



BARTER, a rule of Arithmetic, introduced into books which teach 

 rules without principles, but which, though a very necessary and usual 

 application of arithmetic, would be too obvious a consequence to be 

 introduced into any system of demonstrative arithmetic. It means the 

 exchanging of goods against goods, not against money, and, as might 

 be supposed, the rule is the following : 



" Find the value of that commodity whose quantity is given ; then 

 find what quantity of the other at the rate proposed you may have for 

 the same money, and it will be the answer required." (Bonnycastle's 

 ' Arithmetic.') Thus, to find how many oranges at 2 a penny should 

 be given for 150 apples at 3 a penny, find how much money 150 apples 

 cost at 3 a penny, namely 50 pence, and find how many oranges can be 

 bought for 50 pence at 2 a penny, namely 100. 



BARTER. When one commodity is exchanged directly for another, 

 without the employment of any instrument of exchange which shall 

 determine the value of the merchandise, the transaction is called 

 Barter. All trade resolves itself into an exchange of commodities ; but 

 the commercial exchangers of one commodity for another effect their 

 exchanges by a money-payment, determined by a market-value. This 

 is a Sale. Swift, in his attack upon Wood's halfpence, which he 

 considered as destructive of the money-standard of value, says, " I 

 see nothing left us but to barter our goods, like the wild Indians, 

 with each other." The general evils of such a state are obvious ; 

 and they create dishonest attempts in one exchanger to cheat the 

 other. The North American Indians obtain a few of the comforts 

 and luxuries of civilised life by exchanging skins for manufactured 

 articles. The Indians meet the traders : each man divides his skins 

 into lots, which have a relative value to each other, as that two otter 

 skins are equal to one beaver. For one lot he wants a gun, or a 

 looking-glass, or a blanket, or an axe. The trader has the articles 

 to give the Indian in exchange. Twenty beaver-skins are given for a 

 gun ; the gun costs a pound in Birmingham ; the beaver-skins are 

 worth more than twenty times the amount in London. If the Indians 

 were brought into more general contact with the exchangers of 

 civilised life, they would regulate their exchanges by a money-standard, 

 and would obtain a fairer value for their skins. 



The term barter seems to have been derived from the languages of 

 southern Europe : baratar, Spanish ; barattdre, Italian, which signify 

 to cheat as well as to barter ; hence, also, our word Barratry. The 

 want of a standard of value in all transactions of barter gives occasion 

 to that species of overreaching which prevails from an ignorance of the 

 real principles of trade, by which all exchangers are benefited through 

 an exchange. The examples of barter, however, without any reference 

 to some standard of value, become more and more uncommon, as the 

 commercial intercourse of mankind advances. A skin of corn, or a 

 stone vessel of corn, among some of the Indian tribes, is established as 

 a standard of value ; councils are held to determine the rate of ex- 

 change; and a beaver-skin is thus held to be worth so many more 

 skins of corn than a blanket. This is an approach to a standard of 

 value which almost takes the transaction out of the condition of being 

 a barter. In the trade carried on between Russia and China, the 



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