In law the basis of all instruction was inevitably the _Corpus Juris Civilis_ of Justinian, for the customary law of mediaeval Europe was never a subject of university study. The central book was the _Digest_, summarizing the ripest fruits of Roman legal science, and it was their mastery of the _Digest_ that gives preëminence to the mediaeval civilians. They brought the resources of the whole _Corpus_ to bear on each passage in an elaborate gloss, and they showed refinement and subtlety of legal thought analogous to that of the scholastic philosophers. After all, “law is a form of scholasticism.” But whereas the scholastic method in philosophy has lost hold on much of the modern world, the work of the glossators still survives. “In many respects,” says Rashdall,[5] “the work of the School of Bologna represents the most brilliant achievement of the intellect of mediaeval Europe. The mediaeval mind had, indeed, a certain natural affinity for the study and development of an already existing body of Law. The limitations of its knowledge of the past and of the material Universe were not, to any appreciable extent, a bar to the mastery of a Science which concerns itself simply with the business and the relations of every-day life. The Jurist received his Justinian on authority as the Theologian received the Canonical and Patristic writings, or the Philosopher his Aristotle, while he had the advantage of receiving it in the original language. It had only to be understood, to be interpreted, developed, and applied.... The works of these men are, perhaps, the only productions of mediaeval learning to which the modern Professor of any science whatever may turn, not merely for the sake of their historical interest, not merely in the hope of finding ideas of a suggestive value, but with some possibility of finding a solution of the doubts, difficulties and problems which still beset the modern student.”