BUGS AND BEASTS BEFORE THE LAW.1 By E. P. Evans. I.
TT is said that Bartholomew Chassenee, a .*. distinguished French jurist of the six teenth century, made his reputation at the bar as counsel for some rats which were put on trial before the Ecclesiastical Court at Autun, on the charge of having feloniously eaten up and wantonly destroyed the barley of that province. He is also said to have been employed in several other cases of this kind but no records of them seem to have been preserved. The whole subject, however, has been treated by him in a book entitled " Consilium primum, quod tractatus jure dici potest, propter multiplicem et reconditam doctrinam, ubi luculenter et accurate tractatur quaestio ilia: De excommunicatione animalium insectorum." This treatise, which is the first of sixty-nine consilia, embodying opinions on various legal questions touching the holding and transmission of property, loans, contracts, dowries, wills, and kindred topics, and which holds a peculiar place in the history of jurisprudence, was originally published in 1 5 3 1, and reprinted in 1581, and again in 1588. The edition referred to in the present paper is that of 1581. This curious volume originated, as it ap pears, in an application of the inhabitants of Beaune to the ecclesiastical tribunal of Autun for a decree of excommunication against certain insects called hubercs or hurebers, probably a kind of locust or har vest-fly. The request was granted, and the noxious creatures were duly accursed. Chassenee now raises the query whether such a thing may be rightfully and lawfully done, and how it should be effected. " The principal question," he says, " is whether one can by injunction cause such insects to withdraw from a place in which they are doing damage, or to abstain from doing
damage under pain of anathema and per petual malediction. And although in times past there has never been any doubt of this, yet I have thought that the subject should be examined, lest I should seem to fall into the vice, censured by Cicero, of regarding things which we do not know as if they were understood by us, and hence rashly giving them our assent." His method of investi gation is not that of a philosophic thinker, but that of a lawyer, who quotes precedents and appeals to authorities. He scrupulously avoids all psychological speculation or meta physical reasoning, and simply aims to show that animals have been tried, convicted, and sentenced by civil and ecclesiastical courts, and that the competence of these tribunals has been generally recognized. This documentary evidence is drawn from a great variety of sources; the scriptures of the Old and New Testament, pagan poets and philosophers, patristic theologians and homilists and mediaeval hagiologists, the laws of Moses, the prophecies of Daniel, and the Institutes of Justinian are alike laid under contribution. All is fish that comes to his net out of the deeps of his erudition, be it salmon or sea-urchin. He weighs testimony as a grocer weighs tea, by the pound avoirdupois. If twelve witnesses can be produced in favor of a statement, and only ten against it, his reason bows to the will of the majority, and accepts the propo sition as proved. It must be said, however, to his credit, that he proceeds in this matter with strict and impartial rectitude, and never tries to pack the witness-box. The examples he adduces afford striking illustrations of the gross credulity to which the strongly conservative, preccdent-mon 1 Republished by the kind permission of the Atlantic Monthly magazine.
