434 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. point of death?'" It is even reported that, in the Punjab, "a person mortally wounded frequently makes a statement bringing all his heredi- tary enemies on to the scene at the time of receiving his wound, thus using his last opportunity to do them an injury" (i Stephen's History of the Criminal Law of England, pp. 448-449). Even if these lectures are to be regarded simply as English law carried to India and brought back again, it is plain that English law has been a gainer by its travels ; it comes to us now with an improved flavor, such as a pipe of wine was formerly supposed to acquire by a voyage to Bengal and back. Macaulay, in a familiar passage, has asserted that British lawyers, if called upon to answer a question as to the postulates on which their system rests, or to vindicate the fundamental maxims of that system, often talk the lan- guage of savages or of children. No such reproach can be made against the author of the Tagore Lectures. While he has never criticised for the mere sake of fault-finding, yet he has not attempted to evade a single diffi- culty, and has not hesitated to question, in a manner at once temperate and forcible, some existing English doctrines. It is, perhaps, fortunate that this book did not appear earlier, for it would very likely have embittered the last days of Mr. David Dudley Field. The Draft Civil Code of New York comes in for pointed condem- nation. It is spoken of as a " much and justly criticised performance ; " " an ambitious and unsatisfactory composition, which has had an evil in- fluence on the Indian Codes in more than one place." It is even said of certain clauses : "In fact, the only definite notion they convey to the mind of an English lavvyer is, that the men who set their hand, in the New York draft of a Civil Code, to the work of codifying the Common Law, were not lawyers enough to understand the nature of the difficulties, nor sufficiently skilled in drafting (not to say the correct use of the English language in general) to clothe their meaning, when they had one, in apt words." (See pp. 20, 95, 99, 122.) j. s. The Federal Income Tax Explained. By John M. Gould and George F. Tucker. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1894. pp. xiv, 108. This little book makes no pretensions to being a complete treatise on the income tax. Its avowed object is simply to elucidate those parts of the new statute which have occurred in former acts and been construed in that connection ; and, under the belief that a similar interpretation will be given in the present case, the authors have ransacked the books to good purpose. Recourse has been had not only to American reports, but also to English aed Canadian decisions, though to a far less extent as less applicable to our recent act, and the work as a whole, though necessarily of somewhat hypothetical value, has been put into a service- able shape for the profession at large. d. a. e. General Digest, American and English, Annual, 1894. Prepared and published by the Lawyers' Co-operative Publishing Co., Roch- ester, N. Y., 1894. pp. Ixxxiv, 3070. This is the, ninth volume of the "General Digest of the United States." The new title is in recognition of the presence of the English and Cana- dian decisions. The size pp. 3162 is to be compared with pp. 2722 of the rival publication which has a somewhat larger page and certainly no larger type. r. w. h.
