The following notes are offered in the hope that they may be of some use to teachers and students who are using (as the writer has for some years used) Salmond's Jurisprudence as a text-book for the subject of the Nature and Classification of Rights. They do not pretend to be systematic, and they are meant to be supplementary to the excellent and informative notes of Mr. J. L. Parker to the ninth edition. The page references are to the ninth edition; the section references (§§) will serve for earlier editions as well.

I.—Until quite modern times the expression ‘Criminal Science’ was taken to mean no more than study of criminal law. The nature and the method of criminal science at this stage is best illustrated by the well-known dictum of Carrara, one of the chief exponents of the classical school of criminal law, that ‘crime is not an entity in fact but an entity in law; it is not action but infraction’ (‘il delitto non è un ente di fatto ma un ente giuridico, è una infrazione e non un’azione’). The personality of the delinquent, the origin of crime, the nature and the efficacy of punishment, the relationship between society and criminal justice,—problems which now constitute such an important part of criminal research—for many decades remained completely outside the scope of criminal science as then understood.

It is a far cry to go back now to a controversy which took place almost fifty years ago between two of the foremost exponents respectively of the historical and practical schools of English law, Maitland and Challis. The technical subject of Remainders after Conditional Fees before the passing of De Donis was in question. According to Maitland's view, Remainders limited after Conditional Fees, were common enough, and he vouched Bracton, and a considerable number of Fines all prior to 1285, in support of his argument, at the same time admitting that no Writ protecting such Remainders had been found in any Registrum Brevium.

For reasons both of space and of simplicity, the scope of this article is restricted within narrow limits. The subject to be considered is the priority of mortgages made after 1925 which affect a legal estate in land. This by itself excludes any consideration of transitional provisions or of mortgages of an equitable interest; in addition, the questions of the Middlesex and Yorkshire Deeds Registries, tacking, and conflicts between more than two mortgages will be ignored. Except where otherwise indicated, ‘mortgage’ is used as including both a mortgage and a charge.

In many of the newer law libraries the English Reports Reprint is the only series covering cases before 1866. Even if, as in the older libraries, the original reports are themselves available, they are frequently so out of the way that it is not normally worth the trouble to consult them. Unfortunately, however, a reader who finds some abbreviated reference to a case decided before 1866 cannot be sure that it will be found in the Reprint. Despite the claim in the Index Chart that the Reprint is a ‘complete verbatim re-issue of all the decisions of the English Courts prior to 1866’, it does not include all the collateral reports, nor does it include the specialized reports of Bail Court, Bankruptcy, Railway and Canal, Election, Registration, Local Government, and Patent and Trade Mark cases. Thus the inexpert worker may waste some time before he discovers that, for instance, ‘D. & R.’ is not necessarily to be found in Volume 171, or that ‘Moo. J. B.’ is not a misprint for ‘Moo. L B.’ and is not to be found in Volume 72, or, for the matter of that, any other volume.