HARVARD LAW REVIEW. Published monthly, during the Academic Year, by Harvard Law Students. SUBSCRIPTION PRICE, $2 50 PER ANNUM 35 CENTS PER NUMBER. Editorial Board. Wilfred Bolster, .... Editor-in-Chief. Guy Cunningham, Herbert H. Darling, Treasurer, David T. Dickinson, Stephen A. Foster, Louis Hicks, Carleton Hunneman, Francis C. Huntington, Ralph A. Kellogg, M. Day Kimball, J^mes G. King, James M. Newell, Oliver Prescott, Jr., Ezra R. Thayer, Frank B. Williams. In a recent case in a county court in Iowa, the question was raised between landlord and tenant as to the acquisition of rights of property in a meteorite. The tenant for years saw the meteorite fall, and im- mediately dug it up and sold it. It had already been decided by one of the lower courts of Iowa, in 1875, ^^^^ ^ meteorite which fell on a highway belonged to the owner of the fee and not to the finder ; ^ -and in the case above mentioned the landlord prevailed. The tenant's vendee, however, was not satisfied with the decision, and we may hope soon to obtain the opinion of a court of last resort. There was a case in England,^ in 1839, where large stones had fallen upon copyhold land from an adjoining cliff. The copyholder removed and sold some of these stones, and the lord brought trover and obtained judgment on the ground that the stones had fallen before the copy- holder came into possession, and were part of the soil granted to him. Parke, B., however, prefaced his opinion by saying : *' If it had been shown that these stones had come from the adjoining hills by some convulsion of nature, or by the act of God, while the defendant was the copyholder, his argument would be well founded ; then they would belong either to the party from whose lands they had been severed, or to the copyholder, as having fallen by accident upon his soil ; and the lord would have no more right to them than in the case of an ordinary occupier of land under a landlord. But that question does not arise here. These stones have been in the same state as far back as living memory goes, and are to be considered a portion of the soil," etc. It seems impossible to support this distinction. For if, as is as- sumed by Parke, B., in the case actually before him, the stones were a part of the soil when the tenant came into possession, must they not have been a part of the soil from the moment they fell and became embedded in it? From that moment they were physically annexed to the soil, and what more is necessary to make them a part of it? There cannot, as in the case of a fixture erected by the tenant, be any 1 15 Alb. L. J. 216. 2 Dearden v. Evans, 5 M. & W. ii.
