These general principles will be better understood by their applica tion to particular cases, in English law, of buying and selling land. But it should be premised that there are eases of what is often called notice, in English law, where no knowledge of anything is proved, but the existence of a certain thing is proved, and then notice is legally imputed to the person to be affected by it. Thus, when there is a public act of parliament, everybody is legally supposed to have notice of it. But this is notice which arises from positive law, and is not presumed from the proved knowledge of another fact ; it would there fore be more appropriate to give it some other name, and not to con found it, as some text writers do, with that which they call constructive notice. Another example of such notice made by positive law is, where there is a suit pending" which may affect the subject of sale ; in this case the purchaser is also said to have notice of it, and he buys subject to what may be decreed in the suit. All conveyances by any bankrupt bond fide made and executed before the date of the filing a petition of adjudication are valid, notwithstanding any prior act of bankruptcy committed by the bankrupt, provided the person to whom the conveyance is made had not at the time of such conveyance notice of any prior act of bankruptcy committed by the bankrupt.
Where facts are proved to be known to a man which are sufficient to make him inquire further, he is considered to know all that he might have known if be had made inquiry. For instance, if a man buys an estate which is in the possession of a tenant, notice of such possession is notice of any lease or other interest which the tenant may have in the estate; and though the seller may affect to sell the com plete and immediate interest in the estate, the buyer will take it sub ject to the interest of the tenant. And if a tenant under a lease has some further interest in the land by agreement posterior to the date of the lease, the buyer of the land, who has notice of the tenant's posses sion, has constructive notice of such agreement, and therefore he buys the estate subject to all the tenant's rights. It will of course be observed that the contract of a purchaser with a seller cannot affect the previous contract, about the same land, of another person with the same seller, so far as the mutual rights and liabilities of the seller and that other person are concerned. But the question between the two persons who have dealt with the seller is, Which of the two is to have that thing which he has agreed to buy, and which of the two is to have the trouble of settling the dispute with the seller. It is deter mined that the subsequent contractor, who has what is called notice of the former contract, must be considered as having the benefit of his own contract, but still subject to the prior contract ; and if he has bought the estate and obtained a conveyance of it, having notice of a prior contract for sale, he will be compelled to convey the estate to the person who had such prior contract with the vendor. If the prior contractor has obtained any legal estate in the land, the buyer, of course, whether he has notice or not, only obtains from the vendor such interest as be can sell.
That whiCh is notice to a man's agent is notice to himself, provided the agent has the notice in the transaction in which he acts as agent. This doctrine is obviously founded on• the legal identity of the principal and agent, in all matters which the principal transacts by his agent.
It seems to be determined that the mere fact of a man being witness to the execution of a deed, will not be notice to him of the contents of the deed ; for the nature of that transaction called witnessing a deed is not in any way connected with a knowledge of the contents of the deed.
Sometimes a person who is entitled to a sum of money or the interest of a sum of money which is in the hands of a trustee, will fraudulently sell his interest twice over. A second purchaser, who has no notice of the former transaction, and gives notice, that is, communicates in a way that cannot be misunderstood the fact of his purchase to the trustee before the former purchaser does, is entitled to have what he has bought, in preference to the other purchaser. By not having notice, he
purchases a good title, and acquires a right to what he has bought, equal to the first purchaser's right; by giving notice, he secures that which he has purchased. This is a good example of Notice, viewed under two different aspects, which should not be confounded.
Other examples of notice may be found in the text books.
It will be collected from what has been said, that cases of this kind of notice under consideration, are cases in which three persons at least are generally concerned, a seller, a buyer, and some person who is interested in disputing the buyer's title to the thing which he has bought. The term is also applied, though less frequently, to the case of a seller and buyer only ; for that which may be called notice in the other case may be equally well called notice in this. The seller may not intend to conceal or misrepresent any fact, and he may think that he has said everything that was necessary, and the buyer may think that ho was buying the whole of an estate when the vendor was only selling the estate subject to certain encumbrances ; and the state of facts may be such as would be evidence of notice to the purchaser as against a party who had contracted with the vendor previous to himself. The question then comes, whether such state of facts is to be considered as notice to the purchaser, in the case now supposed, as against the vendor, and equally binding on him as it would be in the case of a prior contracting purchaser. It may be observed that the doctrine of notice, as between a seller and a single buyer, has been applied to the case of a lease, where it was held that notice of a lease to a purchaser was notice of its contents ; but this doctrine was derived from a case wherein three patties were concerned, a seller, a lessee, and a purchaser, and it does not appear to have been considered that the question of notice between two purchasers, or two parties claiming an interest in land against a third person, is not quite the same thing as the case of a dispute between two persons only, a seller and a buyer. (Hall v. Smith, 14 Ve., 426, 437.) This kind of question however, in English law, would be more properly considered under the heads of Concealment, Suppression, or Misrepresentation, which arc a species of fraud ; or under the head of Mistake.
The question of notice is one of great practical importance. So far as relates to what shall be evidence of notice, it will vary greatly in different systems of jurisprudence ; so far as concerns its true nature, it belongs to the general doctrine of contracts.
NOUN (in Grammar), the name of one of the parts of speech into which grammarians have distributed the words of a language. The noun generally expresses the subject of discourse, or tho name (women) of the thing spoken of, as horse, table, darkness, Ste. ; but it may also be used as the predicate, as in the sentence, " Tin is a metal," where both " tin" and " metal" are nouns.
So far as respects the form of nouns, that is, the sounds of which they are composed, they are capable of classification in all languages. The nature of this classification may be explained from examples in our own language. Many nouns are simple roots, as horse, ship, man, tree ; while others are formed by adding a suffix to the root or to other words. [NOTION, NOTIONAL.] The following list of nouns, formed by suffixes, belong to the Saxou part of our language. A few examples of each suffix are given iu order to show the use of each suffix more clearly :— The preceding list contains the majority of the terminations of nouns in the English language which are not simple roots. The number, case, and gender of nouns in general are explained in the articles DUAL NUMBER, GENDER, ABLATIVE, and ACCUSATIVE CASES.