r legal genius as the
use which they made of Usucapion. The difficulties which beset them
were nearly the same with those which embarrassed and still embarrass
the lawyers of England. Owing to the complexity of their system, which
as yet they had neither the courage nor the power to reconstruct,
actual right was constantly getting divorced from technical right, the
equitable ownership from the legal. But Usucapion, as manipulated by
the jurisconsults, supplied a self-acting machinery, by which the
defects of titles to property were always in course of being cured,
and by which the ownerships that were temporarily separated were again
rapidly cemented together with the briefest possible delay. Usucapion
did not lose its advantages till the reforms of Justinian. But as soon
as law and equity had been completely fused, and when Mancipation
ceased to be the Roman conveyance, there was no further necessity for
the ancient contrivance, and Usucapion, with its periods of time
considerably lengthened, became the Prescription which has at length
been adopted by nearly all systems of modern law.

I pass by with brief mention another expedient having the same object
with the last, which, though it did not immediately make its
appearance in English legal history, was of immemorial antiquity in
Roman law; such indeed is its apparent age that some German civilians,
not sufficiently aware of the light thrown on the subject by the
analogies of English law, have thought it even older than the
Mancipation. I speak of the Cessio in Jure, a collusive recovery, in a
Court of law, of property sought to be conveyed. The plaintiff claimed
the subject of this proceeding with the ordinary forms of a
litigation; the defendant made default; and the commodity was of
course adjudged to the plaintiff. I need scarcely remind the English
lawyer that this expedient suggested itself to our forefathers, and
produced those famous Fines and Recoveries which did so much to undo
the harshest trammels of the feudal land-law. The Roman and English
contrivances have very much in common and illustrate each other most
instructively, but there is this difference between them, that the
object of the English lawyers was to remove complications already
introduced into the title, while the Roman jurisconsults sought to
prevent them by substituting a mode of transfer necessarily
unimpeachable for one which too often miscarried. The device is, in
fact, one which suggest