rden, such as horses and
oxen. It is impossible to doubt that the objects which make up the
class are the instruments of agricultural labour, the commodities of
first consequence to a primitive people. Such commodities were at
first, I imagine, called emphatically Things or Property, and the mode
of conveyance by which they were transferred was called a Mancipium or
Mancipation; but it was not probably till much later that they
received the distinctive appellation of Res Mancipi, "Things which
require a Mancipation." By their side there may have existed or grown
up a class of objects, for which it was not worth while to insist upon
the full ceremony of Mancipation. It would be enough if, in
transferring these last from owner to owner, a part only of the
ordinary formalities were proceeded with, namely, that actual
delivery, physical transfer, or _tradition_, which is the most obvious
index of a change of proprietorship. Such commodities were the Res Nec
Mancipi of the ancient jurisprudence, "things which did not require a
Mancipation," little prized probably at first, and not often passed
from one group of proprietors to another, While, however, the list of
the Res Mancipi was irrevocably closed; that of the Res Nec Mancipi
admitted of indefinite expansion; and hence every fresh conquest of
man over material nature added an item to the Res Nec Mancipi, or
effected an improvement in those already recognised. Insensibly,
therefore, they mounted to an equality with the Res Mancipi, and the
impression of an intrinsic inferiority being thus dissipated, men
began to observe the manifold advantages of the simple formality which
accompanied their transfer over the more intricate and more venerable
ceremonial. Two of the agents of legal amelioration, Fictions and
Equity, were assiduously employed by the Roman lawyers to give the
practical effects of a Mancipation to a Tradition: and, though Roman
legislators long shrank from enacting that the right of property in a
Res Mancipi should be immediately transferred by bare delivery of the
article, yet even this step was at last ventured upon by Justinian, in
whose jurisprudence the difference between Res Mancipi and Res Nec
Mancipi disappears, and Tradition or Delivery becomes the one great
conveyance known to the law. The marked preference which the Roman
lawyers very early gave to Tradition caused them to assign it a place
in their theory which has helped to blind their modern disci