718 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE, 
The assuaging of human ills began before there were regulations[for the pre- 
servation of the rights of property, the settlement of disputed questions of inher- 
itance, the redress of grievances between men or settled institutions and laws. The 
very origin of legal principles lies back of all our research, and over this question 
our law writers differ even more than do our medical theorists over the begin- 
nings of their art. 
A sturdy Austrian writer, Dr. Rudolph Von Ihring, insists with intense vehem- 
ence that "all law in the world has been obtained by strife. Every principle of 
law which obtains had first to be wrung by force from those that denied it." 
" The law is not mere theory, but living force. And hence it is that justice, 
which in one hand holds scales in which she weighs the right, carries in the 
other the sword with which she executes it. The sword without the scales is. 
brute force ; the scales without the sword is the impotence of law." 
But there are other equally as acute reasoners who hold directly opposite 
views, one of whom, Savigny, is thus cited by Von Ihring : 
"The earliest law has been, the world over, the law of custom. 
" This law has neither been created nor sought for. It came into existence 
of itself, just as language came, and developed internally in the convictipns of 
the people, externally in the order of life. 
" The legislature is, so to speak, to the law of custom what the physician- 
is to nature. Nature should help itself; the physician should interfere as seldom 
as possible, for his presence shows that the normal condition is disturbed and 
disease exists." 
Ranged in antagonistic and imposing array, along this line of debate, are great 
names, as Hale, Blackstone and others, and their arguments seem entitled to 
equal weight. But law, Hke medicine, however unknown in its earliest eras, 
had its growth, its servitude and exaltation. If the thread of medical research 
carries us back through the laboratory of the alchemist seeking the fabled elixir 
of life, and the solvent that should turn iron into gold, or into the chamber of the 
astrologist finding some relation between the conjunction of planets and the 
lines of the hand or wrinkles of the brow, whereby the ever haunting mystery of 
the future may be made an open page, so does the legal clue into the past lead us 
by courts trying old women " for riding on broomsticks or giving cattle murrain," 
or where the settlement of a contested right was left to the doubtful result of a 
personal contest called " wager of battle," and the innocence or guilt of an ac- 
cused person was solved by various ordeals of water or fire, as exposing him 
to drowning in cold water, scalding him with hot, or by his walking barefoot 
over heated plowshares. Nevertheless, all these past centuries have given some- 
thing besides dross to the solid and well compacted bodies of law and medicine. 
And the same outlook we find to-day in the one we also see in the other. 
Both have a more important and perhaps commanding duty in the present in 
warding off evil results than in rectifying them. In a graphic sentence Macaulay 
ascribes to the attention given by the Royal Society after the great plague of 1665, 
and the great fire of 1666, to the suDJect of sanitary police, "the changes which,. 
