372 Proceedings of the Koyal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
But Rankine was not long in finding his true role to be that of legal 
scholar, writer, and professor. It is not too much to say, reading his life 
backwards, that he had not been a couple of years at the Bar when he 
fixed his mind’s eye on a University Chair of Scottish Law as the goal 
of his ambition, and that he had in ten years from his call to the Bar 
fairly written himself into such a position in the estimation of the legal 
profession in Scotland, and more particularly of his brethren in the Faculty 
of Advocates, as ensured him the first vacancy. 
In 1879 he published the first edition of his Law of Land-ownership, 
a marvellous feat for a man who had been but ten years at the Bar. But 
they had been ten years of close study of the Principles and Case Law of 
Scotland. When John Rankine entered on his selected task, there was 
no room for a further work on the Principles of Scots Law, nor even for 
one which might affect the development of that law in any particular 
direction, as did the Commentaries of George Joseph Bell. Rankine 
wisely confined himself to the systematic ordering of the results of the 
Case Law of Scotland upon the subject in which he was, by heredity, most 
interested — the Law of Scotland, not as it aftects the title to land, but as 
it affects the ownership and occupancy of land. He was a rapid and most 
methodical worker, and it was always an enigma to his contemporaries 
how and when, in so brief a period, he collected such a mass of authoritative 
material. But the leading feature of his published work was the perfect 
marshalling of the material so collected, and the terseness and perspicacity 
of the statement. It is not too much to say that Rankine’s Law of Ljand- 
ownership stands unrivalled as a masterly compendium of the law on a 
very wide and important subject. The Law of Land-ownership was 
followed in May 1887 by his Treatise on Leases, the two together covering 
the whole field which he had appropriated as his own. 
In the second decade of his career at the Bar, Rankine had thus estab- 
lished his claim to be an unrivalled exponent of the Law of his country. 
It was in 1888 that an opening occurred to the position for which he felt 
himself most fitted, and for which he had been, consciously or unconsciously, 
preparing himself; and on the resignation of Professor Norman Macpherson, 
Rankine was appointed to the Chair of Scots Law in the University of 
Edinburgh, which he held to within two months of his death. 
The new Professor was not long in bringing the results of his close 
study of the Law of Scotland to bear upon the preparation of his lectures. 
Taking as his textbook Erskine’s well-known Principles of the Law of 
Scotland, a work which he edited, and re-edited repeatedly during his 
tenure of the chair, for the benefit of his students, he was ready to meet 
