usts of the earth are to the geologist. They contain,
potentially, all the forms in which law has subsequently exhibited
itself. The haste or the prejudice which has generally refused them
all but the most superficial examination, must bear the blame of the
unsatisfactory condition in which we find the science of
jurisprudence. The inquiries of the jurist are in truth prosecuted
much as inquiry in physics and physiology was prosecuted before
observation had taken the place of assumption. Theories, plausible and
comprehensive, but absolutely unverified, such as the Law of Nature or
the Social Compact, enjoy a universal preference over sober research
into the primitive history of society and law; and they obscure the
truth not only by diverting attention from the only quarter in which
it can be found, but by that most real and most important influence
which, when once entertained and believed in, they are enabled to
exercise on the later stages of jurisprudence.

The earliest notions connected with the conception, now so fully
developed, of a law or rule of life, are those contained in the
Homeric words "Themis" and "Themistes." "Themis," it is well known,
appears in the later Greek pantheon as the Goddess of Justice, but
this is a modern and much developed idea, and it is in a very
different sense that Themis is described in the Iliad as the assessor
of Zeus. It is now clearly seen by all trustworthy observers of the
primitive condition of mankind that, in the infancy of the race, men
could only account for sustained or periodically recurring action by
supposing a personal agent. Thus, the wind blowing was a person and of
course a divine person; the sun rising, culminating, and setting was
a person and a divine person; the earth yielding her increase was a
person and divine. As, then, in the physical world, so in the moral.
When a king decided a dispute by a sentence, the judgment was assumed
to be the result of direct inspiration. The divine agent, suggesting
judicial awards to kings or to gods, the greatest of kings, was
_Themis_. The peculiarity of the conception is brought out by the use
of the plural. _Themistes_, Themises, the plural of _Themis_, are the
awards themselves, divinely dictated to the judge. Kings are spoken of
as if they had a store of "Themistes" ready to hand for use; but it
must be distinctly understood that they are not laws, but judgments.
"Zeus, or the human king on earth," says Mr. Grote, in hi