hundred years old, inscribed with the name of a Jewish rabbi, and inlaid in the ancient wall of London—as if to intimate that the law would protect from injury that venerable piece of antiquity.
But at this point the courts of the common law stopped, and held, in humble deference to the ecclesiastical tribunals, that the heir could maintain no civil action for indecently or even impiously disturbing the remains of his buried ancestor, declaring the only remedy to belong to the parson, who, having the freehold of the soil, could maintain trespass against such as should dig or disturb it. The line of legal demarkation established in this subject, between the ecclesiastical and the common-law courts, is thus defined by Coke: "If a nobleman, knight, esquire, etc., be buried in a church, and have his coat-armor and pennons, with his arms, and such other insigns of honor as belong to his degree or order, set up in the church, or if a gravestone he laid or made for memory of him, albeit the freehold of the church be in the parson, and that these be annexed to the freehold, yet cannot the parson, or any, take or deface them, but he is subject to an action to the heire and his heires, in the honor and memory of whose ancestor they were set up" (1st Inst., 4, 18 b). In the "Third Institute," page 203, he asserts the authority of the Church, as follows: "It is to be observed," says he, "that in every sepulchre that hath a monument, two things are to be considered, viz.: the monument, and the sepulture or buriall of the dead. The buriall of the cadaver, that is caro data vermibus" (flesh given to worms), "is nullius in bonis, and belongs to ecclesiastical cognizance; but as to the monument, action is given, as hath been said, at the common law for the defacing thereof."
With all proper respect for the legal learning of this celebrated judge, we may possibly question both the wisdom and the etymology of this verbal conceit, this fantastic and imaginary gift, or outstanding grant to the worms. In the English jurisprudence, a corpse was not given or granted to the worms, but it was taken and appropriated by the Church. In Latin, it was a "cadaver" only because it was some thing fallen (á cadendo), even as the remains of fallen cities, in the letter of Sulpicius to Cicero ("Lit. Fam.," 7), are denominated "cadavera oppidorum."
The learned lexicographers and philologists Martinius and the elder Vossius, both of them contemporaries of Coke, wholly dissent from his whimsical derivation. Martinius derives "cadaver" from "cadendo, quia stare non potest," "Lexicon Philologicum Martinii," 1720; while Vossius unequivocally reproves the derivation in question, as an act of pleasant but inflated trifling. "Suaviter nugantur," says he, "qui cadaver conflatum aiunt, ex tribus vocibus, caro data vermibus" ("Etymologicon Linguæ Latinæ," Amsterdam, 1662). And yet this inflated Latin trifle, the offspring only of Coke's characteristic and inordinate love of epigram, has come down through the last three
