PREFACE.

THE multiplication of books of reports has been, with some, a subject of lamentation, and with others, of positive. censure. And yet, notwithstanding this lamentation and censure, there is no species of learned labor in the law which is sought after with more avidity, or which is of more indispensable necessity. When we enter the lawyer's study, these works form the principal ornament of his well clothed shelves. When we enter the courts of justice, they are found to supply the bar with the elements of polemics, and the bench with the component parts of legal judgment. Indeed, such is their importance, that a court of justice, with judges however learned, without a report of its adju dications, is ephemeral; its influence may be noted for the day, but its value is lost to posterity. It seems, then, that we are constrained to conclude that, as a general proposi tion, the objection to recording and circulating the learned proceedings of the bench and bar is quite unsound. This

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