ADMINISTRATION 173 



resembles what is practised in other commercial 

 affairs, the special factor of marine insurance 

 will alone be taken, as being the most typically 

 maritime and by far the most interesting 

 historically. Ordinary insurance on land is a 

 mere thing of yesterday compared with marine 

 insurance, which, according to some, began 

 in the ancient world, and which was certainly 

 known in the Middle Ages. It is credibly re- 

 ported to have been in vogue among the 

 Lombards in the twelfth century, and on much 

 the same principles as are followed by 

 Canadians in the twentieth. It was certainly 

 in vogue among the English before Jacques 

 Cartier discovered the St Lawrence. And in 

 1613, the year Champlain discovered the site 

 of Ottawa, a policy was taken out, in the 

 ordinary course of business, on that famous 

 old London merchantman, the Tiger, to which 

 Shakespeare twice alludes, once in Macbeth 

 and again in Twelfth Night. 



Modern practice is based on the Imperial 

 Marine Insurance Act of 1906, which is a 

 development of the Act of 1795, which, in its 

 turn, was a codification of the rules adopted 

 at Lloyd's in 1779. Nothing shows more un- 

 mistakably how supreme the British are in 

 every affair of the sea than these striking 



