s. It is evident, therefore, that it required an
original and fresh intellectual effort to gather together the hundreds of
adjudications scattered through our various State reports, classify them,
compare them, study them, and construct a homogeneous and extensive
analysis of their doctrine. This sort of distillation, if we may so speak,
from the crude mass, has been most thoroughly performed by the author of
the work before us; and the result is, that, instead of merely _making_ a
book, he has indeed _written_ one. In reading it, we recall the great
authoritative treatises of the profession, such as Abbott on Shipping, or
Sugden on Vendors, and we are also the more disgusted with the hotchpots
of the "United States Digest," called law-books.

Professor Washburn is fairly before the public as the author of the
"Treatise on the American Law of Real Property," and his merits as a
writer have thus become so well known as to render any new commendation
superfluous. His style is plain, clear, and compact. He addresses himself
directly to the subject of which he is treating, spinning no curious
refinements, and admitting no irrelevant digressions. Nor does he keep the
reader oscillating between text and notes, in a state of dizzying,
unstable equilibrium which would task an acrobate. There be books we have
seen printed, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it
profanely, in which the text was so shingled over with layers of notes, or
the notes were so underpinned by a slight propping of text, that it was
difficult to say, in the language of Easements, which was the servient and
which the dominant tenement. Our author's volume, we are happy to say, is
not thus bifurcated. His law is in his text, and his sources are in his
notes.

There is another feature which we dare not overlook, and that is, the
hearty conscientiousness with which the writer does his work. He takes
nothing at secondhand, but goes straightway to the authorities. It begets
confidence in a writer, when he is enabled to say for himself, as the
Professor apologetically does in his Preface, "It has been my aim to
examine for myself every reported case which bore sufficiently upon the
topic under consideration to warrant a reference to it as an authority";
and when we are further told that "the cases thus examined considerably
exceed a thousand in number," we may form some conception of the great
industry as well as the rare literary honesty of th