NOTES. 213 An Agent's AuTHORrrv by Necessity. — In 8 Harvard Law Review, 496, a note occurs on the sul ject of an agent's authority by necessity, based on the case uf Gwilliam v. Twist, 11 The Thnes, L. R. 205. This case has subsequently been reversed, but on grounds which in no wise impugn the propositions of law laid down in the lower court, the ratio decidendi being that the facts of the particular case did not raise the question of necessity at all. See Gwilliam v. Twist, 1 1 The TimeSy L. R. 415- The Inconsistencies of the Law^ of Gifts. — The May-June number of the American Law Review, has an interesting article by C. B. Labatt, Esq , of the New York bar, on the inconsistencies of the law of gifts. The writer deplores the wide difference between the present rule at com- mon Iliw which makes delivery or a deed essential, in a gift of the legal title, and the lule of equity which makes a gratuitous declaration of trust suffi ient, in a gift of the eq litable interest. He suggests that this rule of equity may have had its origin in an enactment of Justinian, and is of opinion ihat its utter inconsistency with the rule at common law is to be explained only by the peculiar historical position of the Court of Chancery. One is rather puzzled at this because it omits all mention of the case of Ex parte Pye (18 Ves. 140), and seems to assume that the present ru^e regarding declarations of trust is as old as the Court of Chancery itself. But surely the ru'e before the decision in Ex parte Pye was, and f >r three centuries had been, against the validity of a p^ratuitous declara- tion of trust. In Doctor and Student, in the first part of the sixteenth century, it was taken for law that while a man could, for no considera- tion, transfer his equitable interest in property of which another was trustee, he could not, without consideration, grant an equitable interest in his own property, by declaring himself a trustee. In the one case the transaction between donee and donor was complete. The donee asked the aid of equity, not against the donor, but against the trustee, and as the trustee had received something, equity compelled him to account for it. In the other, the donee asked the aid of equity to complete the promised gift of the donor. The donor had received nothing, and equity declined to interfere. (Doctor and Student, Dialogue II., chap. 22, 23.) The rule was perfectly consistent, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century was still taken to be good sense and good law. Sloane v. Cado- gan (Sugden, 3 Vend. & Pur., loth ed., App. 66). Three years after this cas'.% in 1811, Lord Eldon, the most conservative of Chancellors, made, in Ex parte Pye, the famous decision which first gave effect to gratuitous decUrations of trust, and involved the law in its present inconsistencies. Thus the difficulty in the law of gifts, so far as the rules of equity are responsible for it, is not yet one hundred years old. Mr. Labatt thinks it improbable that in these lationalizing days, this branch of law can remain unchanged, and he predicts that the change, when made, will be a compromise, which, while " prohibiting merely informal gifts," will mitigite the " stern and unbending rule of the com- m )n law by permitting certain evidential facts to stand as an adequate substitute for deliveiy." Perhaps a simpler remedy — if it is necessary to have a remedy — would be to abolish by statute tl^e doctrine of Ex parte Pye. That would restore the doctrine of equity to its former satis- factory condition, put an end to the inconsistency of which Mr. Labatt
