ROMAN LAW HISTORICAL SCIENCES 299 



As an outcome of the successful career which has been thus briefly 

 sketched, Roman law became the parent, not only of the word 

 jurisprudence, but of the science which that word denotes. For 

 centuries all over Europe grammar was studied, and in England is 

 still studied, in the concrete form of Latin grammar. In exactly 

 the same way, the science of legal principles was studied through 

 the medium of Roman law. The legists and canonists of the Middle 

 Ages and the Renaissance knew of no other medium, and even in the 

 English universities this law was all-powerful. When Austin founded 

 the modern science of jurisprudence nearly one hundred years ago, 

 although he worked in a non-Roman atmosphere and belonged to 

 the school of Bentham and James Mill, who respected the Digest 

 as little as they did Blackstone or the French doctrine of natural 

 rights, it is interesting to note how little he succeeded in escaping 

 from the clutches of the Roman law. Not only did he use the 

 Corpus very largely as material for his analytical dissecting-knife, but 

 when he gave the results of his analyses, he merely did on a broader 

 scale and with greater elaboration just what a Roman jurist used to 

 do when he constructed a definition of furtum or possessio. The study 

 of Roman law was just then beginning to enjoy on the Continent, 

 in common with other branches of historical science, the greatest of 

 all its revivals. In the powerful hands of Savigny and his followers, 

 its principles were being dragged out from that "disorderly mass" 

 which offended James Mill, 1 and were making splendid additions 

 to the material of juristic science. Soon afterwards the historical 

 movement started by Savigny was extended to remoter regions, 

 and helped to found the modern study of comparative jurisprudence. 

 This was signalized in a striking way when in 1831 the College de 

 France established simultaneously the chair of Archaeology for 

 Champollion and that of Compared Legislation which was soon 

 filled by Laboulaye. In England Sir Henry Maine and his school 

 did as much for the promotion of comparative jurisprudence as they 

 did for the revival of Roman law. Since then the comparative 

 method has developed the still more modern science of ethnological 

 jurisprudence, which places the customs of the negro, the Chinaman, 

 and the Bushman on a level with the laws of the Roman, regarding 

 them all, not as coincidences, but as emanations of a common human 

 nature. 2 Though these newer and broader methods of investiga- 

 tion might seem destined to supersede the study of Roman law to 

 which they owed their birth, such a thing is never likely to occur, 

 simply because the backward races present to us only primitive 

 conceptions in a few subjects such as property, slaver}'-, or marriage, 

 whereas the Roman law was adapted to a high and complex civiliz- 



1 Mill, Jurisprudence (1822), p. 5. 



3 A. Post, Grundriss der ethnologischen Jurisprudenz. 



