Every student of the Pandects knows that the words "Roman law" denote the outcome of long preliminary labours, and the ultimate form of a jurisprudence which cannot be rightly understood without analysing all the historical elements employed in preparing and building it up. Treated in this way, the history of Roman law becomes, as it were, instantly transformed into a history of many different legislations following one another at intervals. From the Twelve Tables down to Justinian, this law never halts for an hour in its constant course of development. Even during the Middle Ages, when the compilations made at Constantinople were studied with religious zeal by expounders and commentators whose sole object was to faithfully reproduce and diffuse this law, even thus, in the hands of those interpreters, influenced by the altered spirit of the times and by new social developments, it underwent changes of which they were not themselves conscious. It is not until the fifteenth century that this historic development can be said to have ceased among us, and Roman law become mainly a subject of learned research. It is at this time that a new and modern system of jurisprudence first reveals itself to history, endowed with a separate life, and with a form of its own, though borrowing much from the Roman law, which in consequence continues to be of the utmost value to us, and still deserves our most assiduous attention, although for a very different purpose from that with which it was studied during the Middle Ages. Our object is now to familiarise ourselves with an immortal monument of ancient wisdom, to shape our legal education by it, to be helped by it to a clearer understanding of our own codes, and to contemplate it in its successive manifestations, while we search for its regulating law. It is in fact the discovery of this law that has at once thrown a new light upon the whole history of Roman jurisprudence, which we perceive to have been always and unceasingly governed by it, and thus forced to assume a character so constant and continuous through all its various transformations, that what had before seemed to be a series of distinct legislations takes an entirely new aspect, making us spectators, as it were, of the evolution of a single idea, the progressive development of a work of Nature.