eir ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their
intention so to do.

These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks--the
Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and
honourable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases,
where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim
possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
others are by no means so scrupulous.

Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated
in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of
a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat
itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up
with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it
before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were
remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs'
teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done,
he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained
attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the
plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line,
harpoons, and boat.

Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was
the judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on
to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con.
case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife's
viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in
the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to
recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he
then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally
harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the
great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet
abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore
when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that
subsequent gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon might have
been found sticking in her.

Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples