But it no more follows, from the single circumstance that certain
facts must concur in order to create the rights incident to
possession, that they must continue in order to keep those rights
alive, than it does, from the necessity of a consideration and a
promise to create a right ex contractu, that the consideration
and promise must continue moving between the parties until the
moment of performance. When certain facts have once been made
manifest which confer a right, there is no general ground on
which the law need hold the right at an end except the
manifestation of some fact inconsistent with its continuance,
[237] the reasons for conferring the particular right have great
weight in determining what facts shall be to be so. Cessation of
the original physical relations to the object might be treated as
such a fact; but it never has been, unless in times of more
ungoverned violence than the present. On the same principle, it
is only a question of tradition or policy whether a cessation of
the power to reproduce the original physical relations shall
affect the continuance of the rights. It does not stand on the
same ground as a new possession adversely taken by another. We
have adopted the Roman law as to animals ferae naturae, but the
general tendency of our law is to favor appropriation. It abhors
the absence of proprietary or possessory rights as a kind of
vacuum. Accordingly, it has been expressly decided, where a man
found logs afloat and moored them, but they again broke loose and
floated away, and were found by another, that the first finder
retained the rights which sprung from his having taken
possession, and that he could maintain trover against the second
finder, who refused to give them up. /1/
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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