JURISPRUDENCE. The use of this term 1 as an equivalent for is confusin and apt to conceal its real import. °Medical uris prudence,* so called, is not even law, ut a compilation of facts, taken from the science of medicine, which may be useful in the determina tion of questions of law. The title (Equity Jurisprudence" on a book generally indicates that it is a treatise on pleadings and procedure in the Court of Chancery, and when one speaks of Americanjurisprudence what is usually meant is the administration and prac tice of the law in America, specifically in the United States. These and many other similar uses of the term are incorrect. Jurisprudence is the science which concerns itself with the discovery and presentation in a systematic man ner •of the relatively few and simple ideas underlying the infinite variety of legal rules. In making its observations and deductions jurisprudence recognizes no limits of time and place ; a rule stated in, or inferred from, a section of the Code of Hammurabi (we 2340) is within its sphere of inquiry just as much as one declared in an act passed by Congress or a State legislature during the present year. Nor does the science take cognizance of the different classes of people whose wants were satisfied by the invention of a legal rule, nor the circum stances under which it was invented. The gen eral rules of hypothec are applicable alike to a bottomry bond, a mortgage on land or a pledge of chattels ; the general rules of possession, ownership and contract are applicable alike to mariners, landlords or pawnbrokers. Jurispru dence should not he confounded with the his tory of laws or of the law; a science which re duces legal phenomena to order and coherence is obviously something quite different from an historic exposition of the law of one or of many countries, or even the juxtaposition for the purpose of comparison of the rules embodied in various systems of law. The comparative study of laws engrossed the attention of Roman jurists, and in the jus pentium they put together the rules which they found to be common to a great number of legal systems. Their ideal was a universal code, from which all systems were imagined to be derivable, or toward which they were supposed to tend. It was in their efforts to realize this ideal that the Romans made a discovery of far greater importance than that of a merely material unity in the laws of many nations. There was disclosed to them a formal unity which enabled them to rubricate the essential principles of their ideal or °Natural law" in spite of the heterogeneous origin of their material and the differences of the methods of grouping the topics adopted in the various legal systems. In a the Roman jurists
invented the science of jurisprudence, which differs from comparative law as much as it differs from legal history. In making this in vention the Romans did a service for law, parallel to the service done by the Alexandrian Greeks for language when they invented gram mar. The difference between comparative law and our science is well stated by Dr. T. E. Hol land in his 'Elements of Jurisprudence) by the following illustrations: "It is the office of com parative law to ascertain what have been at dif ferent times and in different communities the periods of prescription or the requisites of a good marriage; it is for jurisprudence to duci-' date the meaning of prescription in its relation to ownership and to actions at law, or to explain the legal aspects of a marriage and its connec tions with property and the A science of jurisprudence, to be sure, might be deduced from the observation of the laws of a single nation, just as the Alexandrian Greeks deduced a science of grammar from Greek, the only language they familiarly knew —and just as the general formulae of grammar thus derived are applicable to all languages, so would a formal science of jurisprudence, though de duced from but one system of laws, be of uni versal application. While comparative law and legal history are not prerequisites, nevertheless they are invaluable aids toward the formulation of the science. Comparison of the laws en forced in the same country at different times, or of similar though not Identical laws of vari otis countries, greatly improves the possibility of separating the essential elements of the science from their historical accidents, and of discovering the relative importance of human Wants by the universality (or the reverse) of legal provisions respecting these wants. The means whereby humanity has satisfied its wants are as infinite in number as the wants them selves, but humanity has not always, nor often, had clear conceptions of the ends to be at tained by the means employed. Legal history, therefore, is a vast accumulation of complex and perverse facts. Jurisprudence obtains unity out of this complexity by observing the human wants for the satisfaction of which laws have been invented, and the modes in which such wants have been actually satisfied; by collating and digesting the facts observed, with no regard for their historical or geographical associations, and arranging the formal rules deduced from this matter in categories, according to logical principles derived from other practical sciences.