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Part IV. Of certain Persons and Miscellaneous Heads of Law connected with conveyancing (a).

Some of the chapters or sections have a scanty appearance. But this has arisen partly from the principle of selection above adverted to, and partly from the endeavour to devise as accurate and perspicuous an arrangement of the subject as possible, and one that might be convenient for the purpose of annotation by the reader; which has produced a greater subdivision than that which might otherwise have been adopted.

To select, abridge, arrange, combine, and digest, and, in very many instances, to define, correct, qualify, harmonise, deduce, and distinguish, has involved the perusal of many thousands of pages of text-books, the search of a very great number of volumes of reports, and some years of perplexing thought and arduous labour.

That a work relating to so vast a subject, and comparatively in so small a compass, should not be liable to the charge of a number of omissions and inadvertences, can hardly be reasonably expected. And therefore, although the manner in which his other labours in legal authorship have been received by several of the Judges and of the leading Members of the Bar encouraged the writer to make

(a) For a concise work on the Law of Property, not connected with Conveyancing, the reader is referred to the Author's "Manual of Common Law," founded on about seventy text-books, and the subsequent statutes and cases, and comprising the fundamental principles, and the points most usually occurring in daily life and practice (9th edition).

the present attempt to facilitate a knowledge of the Law of Property, so far as it primarily bears upon Conveyancing, and consequently is also connected with Equity and Common Law, and although the time expended upon the undertaking has far exceeded that which a book upon any particular subject would have required, yet it is with the utmost diffidence that he ventured to submit the present work to the Profession. Though it may fall far short of what he, so far as the time at his command would permit, has endeavoured to make it, yet he trusts it is calculated to prove a valuable nucleus of that generally applicable and useful, and therefore really practical learning, which it is needful for every one to appropriate to himself, and around which he may readily agglomerate such further "amiable and admirable secrets of the law" (a) as he may think expedient and possible to be stored up in his mind. And the Author has had the satisfaction of receiving ample testimony to its usefulness, whether as a book to be read and got up, or as a book to be referred to, for the rapid exigencies of daily practice.

J. W. S.

January, 1870.

(a) Co. Litt. 71 a.

VOL. I.

b

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