v. Custom. V. Custom. This is in every country a source of law. We mention it here more particularly because, as observed above, it is through custom that the Roman Law found its way into Holland, and it is as custom that it continues to exist in the Roman-Dutch Colonies. Without attempting a bibliography of the jus civile we may perhaps be allowed to recommend the student to supply himself with the Mommsen-Krüger edition of the Corpus Juris. For a law lexicon he will consult the older works of Calvin[1] or Vicat[2] or Heumann's Hand-Lexicon,[3] or the exhaustive Vocabularium jurisprudentiae in course of publication under the auspices of the Savigny Foundation.
Sources of the Modern Law. Such, then, are the sources of the Roman-Dutch Law, or such were its sources while it still flowed in an undivided stream. They remain to-day the sources of law for the several Roman-Dutch Colonies, supplemented by enactments of the local legislatures, decisions of the local tribunals, and local authoritative custom. The treatises and opinions of modern lawyers do not make law, though they often help the inquirer to find out what the law is.
Works on Colonial Law. The principal works on the modern law of South Africa are: The Common Law of South Africa, in 4 vols., by Dr. Manfred Nathan; The Institutes of Cape Law, by Chief Justice Sir A. F. S. Maasdorp; English and Roman-Dutch Law, by Mr. George T. Morice.
For the Law of Ceylon the student may refer to The Laws of Ceylon, by Mr. Justice Pereira (2nd ed., Colombo, 1913); to A Digest of the Civil Law of Ceylon, by Sir P. Arunachalam (vol. i, ‘Persons Natural and Juristic’, London, 1910); and to the earlier work entitled Institutes of the Laws of Ceylon, by Henry Byerley Thomson, a Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court of Ceylon, published in 1846. Sir Charles Marshall's Judgments, &c., of