many of which were published in the current volumes of reports, and were read by the profession throughout the State of New York, and probably extensively throughout the country, that he mainly owed his great reputation at the bar. The brief in Silsbury v. McCoon (3 N. Y. 379) is one of the most noteworthy, and is given with con siderable fullness in a note to the report. The proposition established in that case was, that where a quantity of corn was taken from the owner by a willful trespasser, and converted by him into whiskey, the property was not changed, and that the whiskey belonged to the owner of the origi nal material, and that a creditor having an execution against the owner of the corn might seize the whiskey and sell it to satisfy his debt. In his argument in this case, where he succeeded in reversing the judg ment of the Supreme Court, Mr. Hill thoroughly and clearly explained the pro visions of the civil law relating to this question, and argued that the common law did not differ from the civil law, where the confusion of goods had been the result of a wrongful design and intent, and was not merely from negligence or inadvertence. Mr. Hill in his brief says that the civil law from which the common law on this subject was derived, made a plain distinction be tween bona fide and fraudulent accession, holding that no title could in any case be obtained by the latter; that this is a principle of the common law, having been adopted along with the general law of ac cession, and expressly recognized by various common law decisions; and he contended that the arguments against it were founded on views not sanctioned by the common law. In this case, the Court of Appeals, by a vote of five to two, reversed the judgment of the Supreme Court and sustained Mr. Hill's position. A dissenting opinion was written by Chief-Judge Bronson, who as justice of the Supreme Court delivered the
opinion of that court, which was under re view. It may be remarked that at that time judges in the State of New York were allowed to sit in review of their own deci sions; a practice which was prohibited by the new judiciary article adopted in 1870, and since that time has not been allowed. The case was twice argued in the Court of Appeals by Mr. Hill, the judges on the first argument being equally divided in opinion. Thomas v. Winchester (6 N. Y. 396) is another case in which Mr. Hill, as counsel for the respondents, succeeded in sustaining a judgment of the Supreme Court estab lishing a principle which is now well settled and familiar. In that case, the defendants were engaged in putting up and vending vegetable extracts in the city of New York. Among the extracts so prepared and sold by them were those known respectively as the extract of dandelion, and the extract of belladonna, the former a mild and harmless medicine, and the latter a vegetable poison which, if taken as a medicine in such quanti ty as might be safely administered of the former, would destroy the life or seriously impair the health of a person to whom the same might be administered. The defend ants sold a jar of the extract of belladonna, which had been labeled by them as the extract of dandelion, to one Aspinwall, who afterwards sold it to one Foord, a druggist in Cazenovia, of whom the plaintiff, Mrs. Thomas, bought it, and believing it to be the extract of dandelion which had been pre scribed for her by her physician, took it, and was very greatly injured in health. The complaint averred that the injury was caused by the negligence and unskillfulness of the defendant in putting up and falsely labeling the jar of belladonna as dandelion, whereby the plaintiff, as well as the druggists and all of the persons through whose hands it passed, were induced to believe, and did be lieve that it contained the extract of dande lion. It was contended on the part of the
