qualities of a corporation seem to have been transferred to the
individual citizen. His physical death is allowed to exercise no
effect on the legal position which he filled, apparently on the
principle that that position is to be adjusted as closely as possible
to the analogies of a family, which, in its corporate character, was
not of course liable to physical extinction.

I observe that not a few continental jurists have much difficulty in
comprehending the nature of the connection between the conceptions
blended in a universal succession, and there is perhaps no topic in
the philosophy of jurisprudence on which their speculations, as a
general rule, possess so little value. But the student of English law
ought to be in no danger of stumbling at the analysis of the idea
which we are examining. Much light is cast upon it by a fiction in our
own system with which all lawyers are familiar. English lawyers
classify corporations as Corporations aggregate and Corporations sole.
A Corporation aggregate is a true Corporation, but a Corporation sole
is an individual, being a member of a series of individuals, who is
invested by a fiction with the qualities of a Corporation. I need
hardly cite the King or the Parson of a Parish as instances of
Corporations sole. The capacity or office is here considered apart
from the particular person who from time to time may occupy it, and,
this capacity being perpetual, the series of individuals who fill it
are clothed with the leading attribute of Corporations--Perpetuity.
Now in the older theory of Roman Law the individual bore to the family
precisely the same relation which in the rationale of English
jurisprudence a Corporation sole bears to a Corporation aggregate. The
derivation and association of ideas are exactly the same. In fact, if
we say to ourselves that for purposes of Roman Testamentary
Jurisprudence each individual citizen was a Corporation sole, we shall
not only realise the full conception of an inheritance, but have
constantly at command the clue to the assumption in which it
originated. It is an axiom with us that the King never dies, being a
Corporation sole. His capacities are instantly filled by his
successor, and the continuity of dominion is not deemed to have been
interrupted. With the Romans it seemed an equally simple and natural
process, to eliminate the fact of death from the devolution of rights
and obligations. The testator lived on in his heir or in the gro