the miners ignored the water-law of the Atlantic seaboard which gave each person bordering on a stream some share of the water, and adopted instead the custom better suited to a new country of first come, first served. Almost the earliest task of the founders of a Colony was the regulation of the disputes which arise in a primitive civilization by a brief legislative code concerning crimes, torts, and the simplest contracts, in many ways like the dooms of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Gaps in these codes were not filled from the Common Law, as would be the case to-day, but by the discretion of the magistrate, or in some Colonies, in the early days, from the Bible. Land laws and conveyances were simple,--the underlying English principle of primogeniture was abolished outright by several Colonial charters, and disputes of title were lessened by the admirable system of registering deeds. Such law did not require lawyers, and it is not surprising that even the magistrates were usually laymen. The chief justice of Rhode Island as late as 1818 was a blacksmith. Oftentimes a controversy was taken away from the court by the legislature and settled by a special statute. Thus, instead of the English and modern American judge-made law, the Colonists received for the most part executive and legislative justice, and lived under a protoplasmic popular law, with the Common Law only one of its many ingredients. The training of the few Colonists who did become lawyers may be judged from that of an early attorney general of Rhode Island: “When he made up his mind to study law, he went into the garden to exercise his talents in addressing the court and jury. He then selected five cabbages in one row for judges, and twelve in another row for jurors. After trying his hand there a while, he went boldly into court and took upon himself the duties of an advocate, and a little observation and experience there convinced him that the same cabbages were in the court house which he thought he had left in the garden,--five in one row and twelve in another.” The natural alienation of such attorneys from the intricacies of English law was increased by occasional conflicts between that system and Colonial statutes or conceptions of justice. An excellent Connecticut act for the disposal of a decedent’s land was declared void by the Privy Council in London as contrary to the laws of England, and the attempt of the New York governor and judges to enforce the obnoxious English law of libel in the prosecution of Peter Zenger in order to throttle the criticism of public officials by the press, would have succeeded if the jury had not deliberately rejected the legal definitions given by the court.