TITLE BY ADVERSE POSSESSION 143 tive fact." The important difference is that apparently here there is no possessory title to the way either as against the servient owner or against the world, until the right has been asserted for the full prescriptive period; there is no "legally protected possession of an incorporeal thing." ^ Take the case of a way used by A for four years on B's land. Would the claimant and possessor of the quasi- dominant be protected in his use against third persons? Mr. Jus- tice Hohnes doubts it.^^ The inchoate title by prescription, the potentiality of acquiring an easement within less than twenty years, is, however, something which can be transmitted with the quasi-dominant tenement so that the successive periods of user may be tacked where there is privity between the successive claimants .^^ The legislative policy of prescription and adverse possession is the same, — that titles to property should not remain uncertain and in dispute, but that continued de facto exercise and assertion of a right should be con- clusive evidence of the dejure existence of the right. "The earliest act of user proved, tends to prove a right then existing. . . . Such light evidence gains force by continued repetition, until at the end of twenty years it becomes, unexplained, conclusive evidence of right."" Prescription, therefore, like adverse possession, operates to quiet titles which have been consistently asserted, and the requisites are in general the same. If we had a scientific system for the registration of titles, adverse possession would be of far less importance. Accordingly we find that title by adverse possession is not recognized under some of the Torrens Acts, although it is under others.^^ But under our crude conveyancing and recording systems this doctrine is indispensable as a protection to just titles. Every title in the country may easily
- 2 P. & M. Hist. Eng. Law,i42; Pollock, First Book of Jurisprxidence, 184.
»* Common Law, 241. Cf., however, Terry, Anglo-American Law, § 311, 297. See also Greenhalgh v. Brindley, [1901] 2 Ch. 324; Lord Battersea v. Commissioners. [1895] 2 Ch. 708. » McLean v. McRae, 50 N. S. R. 536, 33 D. L. R. 128, 132 (1917). " Wallace v. Fletcher, 30 N. H. 434 (1855). »« But see "Statute of Limitations and The Land Titles Act," 47 Can. L. J. 5; J. E. Hogg, Austrauan Torrens System, 85, 806; Lightwood, Time Limit on Actions, 133; Hurd's III. Rev. Stat. (1917) ch. 30, § 84. J. E. Hogg, "Registration of Title to Land," 28 Yale L. J. 54 (November, 1918).
