nothing seems to have surprised and interested him more than the assurance of his teachers that, in the ancient language he was learning, there survived legal writings asserted to be of sacred origin, of vast antiquity, and of universal obligation among Hindus. The oldest of them was said to have been dictated by Manu, a divine being who had been mysteriously associated with the creation of all things; and it was described as the acknowledged basis of all Hindu law and Hindu institutions, the fountain of all civil obligation to more than a hundred millions of men. The book was actually extant, and the translation of it which he gave to the world, with the title Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Menu, according to the Gloss of Cullúca,' was the first-fruits of his labours on the Digest which he had planned. He seems, in fact, to have regarded it as standing to this projected Digest much in the same relation as the Roman Institutes to the celebrated Digest of the Emperor Justinian. It does not seem to me possible to doubt that the account which Sir William Jones gave of the Book of Manu in his Preface to his translation was a rationalised version of the statements made to him by his native teachers, who seem all to have belonged to one particular school of Hindu learning, accustomed to hold Manu in especial honour. Sir William Jones considered this personage, who, in the treatise called after him, sits 'reclining on his arm, with his attention fixed on one object, the supreme God,' as a real individual human being, and the personal author of the legislation attributed to him. Sir William Jones compares him to the Cretan Minos and the Egyptian Men, partly on account of the consonance of names. As I have just stated, he sees an analogy in this law-book to the Institutes of the Roman Justinian, but he assigns to it the prodigious date of 1,280 years before Christ. In the light of newer knowledge, which nevertheless might not have existed but for Jones, we can see that these statements of his require correction. There is no doubt that, if Manu is to be compared to a book known to Englishmen, it should have been to a book a good deal more familiar to them than the Roman Institutes, the book of Leviticus. For Manu, though it contains a good deal of law, is essentially a book of ritual, of priestly duty and religious observance; and to this combination of law with religion the whole family of Hindu writings, to which the book of Manu belongs, owe some remarkable characteristics on which I am desirous of dwelling. It is not at the same time to be supposed that the combination is peculiar to the Hindus. There is no system of recorded law, literally from China to Peru, which, when it first emerges into notice, is not seen to be entangled with religious ritual and observance. The law of the Romans has been thought to be that in which the civil and Pontifical jurisprudence were earliest and most completely disentangled. Yet the meagre extant fragments of the Twelve Tables of Rome contain rules which are plainly religious or ritualistic : Thou shalt not square a funeral pile with an adze. We are told by Cicero ('De Legibus,' 2, 25, 64) that several of these rules contained in the Tenth of the Roman Tables were taken from Greek originals. He attributes the Greek rules to Solon, and explains that they limited the costliness of the ancient ritual of funerals. The opinions of Sir William Jones produced great effects both in the East and in the West. One result which followed from them I must pass by with notice very unequal to its practical importance. The AngloIndian Courts accepted from the school of Sanscritists which he founded the assertion of his Brahmanical advisers, that the sacred laws beginning in the extant book of Manu were acknowledged by all Hindus to be binding on them. The impression in the mind of the English judicial officers—an impression shared, I infer from its language, by the English Parliament— manifestly was that the sacerdotal Hindu law corresponded nearly to the English Common Law, and was at least the substructure of all the rules of life followed by Hindus. It is only just beginning to be perceived that this opinion had a very slender foundation, for it is probable that at the end of the last century large masses of the Hindu population had not so much as heard of Manu,1 and knew little or nothing of the legal rules supposed to rest ultimately on his authority. The original range of operation which it is possible to allow to the sacerdotal laws has been much narrowed by very recent investigation. Some years ago, on my return from India, I stated in a book on 'Village Communities in the East and West' (pp. 52, 53) the opinion which I had formed after personal inquiry among Indian judicial officers. 'The conclusion,' I said, 'arrived at by the persons who seem to me of highest authority is, first, that the codified law-Manu and his glossators-embraced originally a much smaller body of usage than had been imagined; and next, that the customary rules, reduced to writing, have been very greatly altered by Brahmanical expositors, constantly in spirit, sometimes in tenor. Indian law may in fact be affirmed to consist of a very great number of local bodies of usage, and of one set of customs, reduced to writing, pretending to a diviner authority than the rest, exercising consequently a great influence over them, and tending, A high authority informs me that there are few, if any, references to Manu in the Sanscrit literature other than the legal treatises. These last quote a Manu,' but the writings quoted under that name are not those now extant. if not checked, to absorb them.' Since then, my conclusion has been greatly fortified by more systematic examination of the phenomena. There is in India a province, the Punjab, the country of the Five Rivers, which was the earliest seat of the Aryan Hindus on their descent from their original home into the Indian plains. The laws and institutions of this province have quite lately been the subject of an exhaustive official inquiry (Punjab Customary Law,' edited by C. L. Tupper, Calcutta, 1881). Among several results of great interest which seem to me to have been reached, one is that we have in the Punjab the Hindu institutions very much in the state in which they were before the Brahmanical expositors took them in hand. The traces of the religious ideas which profoundly influenced the development of what is known as the Hindu law are here extremely slight; and few things can be more instructive to the legal archæologist than the comparison of the Punjab rules with those worked out in Brahmanical schools far to the south-east. This Punjab Hindu law exhibits in fact some singularly close resemblances to the most ancient Roman law. There is also evidence that the stream of Hinduism which at some time or another flowed over the southern peninsula of India was extremely superficial." The southern Hindu has 2 Much attention is deserved by the two works of Mr. J. H. Nelson, A View of the Hindu Law as administered by the High |