enjoyment for sixty years the claim is to be absolute and indefeasible.
Rights of way and other easements, or any watercourse, or the use of any water, to be enjoyed upon, over, or from any land or water, and also as to the access or use of light to and for any dwelling-house, workshop, or other building, are prescribed after twenty or at least forty years, instead of thirty and sixty respectively. An uninterrupted enjoyment of lights for twenty years constitutes an absolute and indefeasible right to them.
3. Prescriptive rights may be extinguished by abandonment, express or implied; and after a period of twenty years' nonuse, or sometimes even after a shorter period, abandonment will regularly be presumed. They are also extinguished by operation of law when the dominant and servient tenements come info the possession of the same owner in fee.
As we have seen, the right to real property is by the Real Property Limitation Act, 1874, extinguished after twelve years' adverse possession. The Limitation Acts which affect the ownership of real property differ from other Limitation Acts which concern personal property or a right of action in that the latter only bar the remedy after the lapse of the time fixed by law; they do not take away the right; the former, on the contrary, extinguish the right.
The conditions for prescription in the United States are in general the same as in England, except that as a rule a period of twenty years is necessary and sufficient to acquire both land and incorporeal hereditaments, and also to extinguish those rights. In some States squatters who have cultivated plots of land in good faith may become owners of them by prescription in a shorter space of time than twenty years.
The subject of prescription is a thorny one in English law, and it would be imprudent for a confessor not otherwise specially skilled to venture to determine questions of right by prescription. What has been said will, it is hoped, enable him to judge how far conscience may follow the law, and when a penitent should be recommended to consult a lawyer.
