pride in being thought like King George the Third, his restoration from a fainting fit by the application to his nose (after hartshorn and alcohol had failed) of a dusty volume of the statutes, of his old-world courtesy, and so on. It may be interesting to refer to a few of Parke's leading judgments. One of the best known is Langridge v. Levy. There the de fendant knowingly sold to the father of the plaintiff, and for use by the plaintiff, a gun with a warranty as to its safety; the gun burst and injured the plaintiff, who sued in " case." The question arose whether the action was maintainable. Parke delivered the judgment of the Court of Exchequer. He pointed out that the action could not be supported upon the warranty as a contract, since there was no privity in that respect between the plaintiff and the defendant. Thefatherwas the con tracting party with the defendant, and could alone sue upon that contract for the breach of it. But the action was in his lordship's opinion maintainable in " case " or tort. "The defendant," he said, "has knowingly sold the gun to the father for the purpose of being used by the plaintiff by loading and discharging it, and has knowingly made a false warranty that it might be safely done, in order to effect the sale; and the plaintiff, on the faith of that warranty, and believing it to be true, used the gun, and thereby sus tained the damage which is the subject of this complaint. The warranty between these par ties has not the effect of a contract : it is no more than a representation, but it is no less. We think therefore that, as there is fraud and damage, the result of that fraud not from an act remote and consequential, but one contemplated by the defendant at the time as one of its results, the party guilty of the fraud is responsible to the party injured." The court did not decide, however, that the defendant would have been responsible to a person not within this contemplation at the time of the sale, to whom the gun might have been sold or handed over. This judg
ment was affirmed by the Court of Exchequer Chamber in " error." Another of Parke's leading decisions, this time given in the House of Lords, is Chasemore v. Richards. The plaintiff, a landowner and millowner, had for above sixty years enjoyed the use of a stream, which was chiefly supplied by subterranean water, percolating through the substrata. Water, which would otherwise have been thus sup plied to the stream, was diverted from it by the defendant, an adjoining landowner, who dug on his own ground a well for the pur pose of supplying water to the inhabitants of the district. The plaintiff, having lost the use of the stream, was held to have no right of action against the defendant for thus abstract ing the water, which was of " sensible value in and towards the working" of the mill. This case, taken in conjunction with Acton v. Blundell (12 Meeson & Welsby, 324), has affirmed conclusively this proposition, that the disturbance or removal of the soil in a man's own land, though it is the means (by process of natural percolation) of dry ing up his neighbor's spring or well, does not constitute the invasion of a legal right, and will not sustain an action; and further, it makes no difference whether the damage arise by the water percolating away, so that it ceases to flow along channels through which it previously found its way to the spring or well, or whether, having found its way to the spring or well, it ceases to be retained' there. The last of Parke's judgments to which we shall refer was delivered in Buron v. Denman. The plaintiff, who was a Spaniard and not a subject of the Queen, was lawfully pos sessed of slaves on the west coast of Africa. The defendant was captain of a man-of-war, which had proceeded to the Gallinas to re lease two British subjects there detained as slaves. He concluded a treaty with the native king for the abolition of the slave trade in his country, and in execution of the treaty fired the plaintiff's premises and car ried away and released his slaves. Denman's
