Christianity, his guidance, being not only learned but statesmanlike, was of the greatest value. Plans of codification, moreover, were prepared, and largely shaped, under Maine's direction, which were carried into effect by his successors, Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen and Dr Whitley Stokes. The results are open to criticism in details, but form on the whole a remarkable achievement in the conversion of unwritten and highly technical law into a body of written law sufficiently clear to be administered by officers to many of whom its ideas and language are foreign. All this was in addition to the routine of legislative and consulting work and the establishment of the legislative department of the government of India on substantially its present footing. Maine's power of swiftly assimilating new ideas and appreciating modes of thought and conduct remote from modern Western life came into contact with the facts of Indian society at exactly the right time, and his colleagues and other competent observers expressed the highest opinion of his work. In return Maine brought back from his Indian office a store of knowledge which enriched all his later writings, though he took India by name for his theme only once. This essay on India was his contribution to the composite work entitled _The Reign of Queen Victoria_ (ed. T. H. Ward, 1887). Not having been separately published, it is perhaps the least known of Maine's writings; but its combination of just perception and large grasp with command of detail is not easily matched outside W. Stubbs's prefaces to some of the chronicles in the Rolls series, and (more lately) F. W. Maitland's monographs. As vice-chancellor of the university of Calcutta, Maine commented, with his usual pregnant ingenuity, on the results produced by the contact of Eastern and Western thought. Three of these addresses were published, wholly or in part, in the later editions of _Village Communities_; the substance of others is understood to be embodied in the Cambridge Rede lecture of 1875, which is to be found in the same volume. The practical side of Maine's experience was not long lost to India; he became a member of the secretary of state's council in 1871, and remained so for the rest of his life. In the same year he was gazetted a K.C.S.I. In 1869 Maine was appointed to the chair of historical and comparative jurisprudence newly founded in the university of Oxford by Corpus Christi College. Residence at Oxford was not required, and the election amounted to an invitation to the new professor to resume and continue in his own way the work he had begun in _Ancient Law_. During the succeeding years he published the principal matters of his lectures in a carefully revised literary form: _Village Communities in the East and the West_ (1871); _Early History of Institutions_ (1875); _Early Law and Custom_ (1883). In all these works the phenomena of societies in an archaic stage, whether still capable of observation or surviving in a