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law. The Civil Procedure of all the Courts was regulated by another Ordinance of the same year and day.^[1]

The Roman-Dutch Law in Holland. The history of the Roman-Dutch Law during the existence of the Dutch Republic is for our present purpose the history of the authorities from whom we derive our knowledge of it. To these we shall presently refer. In the home of its origin the Roman-Dutch Law as a separate system survived by a few years the dissolution of the Republic of the United Netherlands. In 1809 it was superseded by the Napoleonic Codes, which in turn gave place in 1838 to the existing codes in force in the kingdom of the Netherlands. Van der Linden, the latest writer on the old law, was also the earliest writer on the new. When the old system crumbled beneath his hands he left unfinished his projected Supplement to Voet's Commentary upon the Pandects;^[2] applying his tireless industry in a new field, he became to his countrymen the interpreter of the laws of their conqueror.^[3] The existing Dutch Civil Code, however, in many respects reverts from the rules of the French law to the earlier law of Holland.

Having said thus much of the Roman-Dutch Law in general, we shall proceed next to speak more particularly of its history in the Roman-Dutch Colonies,^[4] for by that name we may conveniently indicate the British possessions in which this system obtains. After that we shall go on to speak of the sources from which our knowledge of the Roman-Dutch Law is derived.

The Roman-Dutch

The two great trading companies of East and West, the Dutch East India Company incorporated in 1602,

1. 2 G. P. B. 695. See Wessels, Hist. R.-D. L., p. 186. An annotated edition of this Ordinance by Willem van Aller was published at Middelburg in 1664.
2. Johannis Voet, Commentarii ad Pandectas, tomus tertius: ejusdem commentarii continens supplementum, auctore Joanne van der Linden. Sectio prima, a libro I usque ad XII Pandectarum, Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1793.
3. In his Beredeneerd register op het wetboek Napoleon ingericht voor het Koningrijk Holland (Amsterdam, 1809), and other works.
4. See an article by the present writer on ‘The Fate of the Roman-Dutch Law in the British Colonies,’ Journ. Comp. Leg., N.S. vol. vii (1906), p. 356, which, by kind permission, is partly reproduced in the text.