374 SOME THOUGHTS ON 



by material resemblance. The tradition of magnitudes is always 

 inaccurate even when there is not, as in the case of coinage, 

 any advantage to be gained by inaccuracy. The French livre, 

 for instance, though shrunk to a shadow of its former self, pre- 

 served to the last the due number of sous and deniers. The 

 tradition of magnitudes is, so to speak, physical, that of relations, 

 mental. 



3. William Von Humbolt wrote an ingenious essay (first 

 published in the Bevlin Transactions") on- the influence which 

 is exerted on a language by its having been reduced to writ- 

 ing. It is easy in a general way to see that writing not only 

 gives greater fixity to language but also greater influence to the 

 educated class by whom alone it is familiarly employed. Cor- 

 responding to this is the reduction of weights and measures 

 to tables, &c., whieh are made a part of ordinary education, 

 and here we find an analogy which both the sciences I have 

 been speaking of bear to jurisprudence. In the famous essay 

 on the vocation of the age to codification, Savigny has pointed 

 out that in the earlier period of the history of a nation law is a 

 living and popular thing, " volitat per ora virum," and does not 

 fall into the hands of a particular class, at least not to any great 

 extent, until a later time. It ascribes this mainly to its increas- 

 ing complexity, but it arises also from the division of labour 

 inseparable from the progress of civilization, and likewise from 

 other causes. In English literature it is curious to see how 

 much more frequent legal allusions are in old than in more 

 recent writers. Some have fancied that Shakespeare must have 

 Lad a legal education, but the same thing might have been 

 thought with regard to Chaucer. Hugo has pointed out that 

 many phrases of quotation or reference in the Digest relate not 

 to the maxims of earlier writers but to what may be called legal 

 proverbs. To these correspond in the history of Metrology such 

 maxims as " a pound is a pint,' r or the Arabs' saying that a 

 mile is as far as one can tell a man from a woman. Of much 

 the same nature are the names given to measures of land from 

 the quantity of seed which they were supposed to require. 

 Half legal, half metrological are such things as Mr Justice 

 Buller's well-known rule, and the curious determinations in the 

 Sachsen Spiegel, whereby a man was hindered from making his 



