Page:An essay on the transfer of land by registration.djvu/32

 CHAPTER IV.

objectors to this system are of two classes—the one denying the practicability of its application to this country, the other denying its utility if applied.

As from the first the system was confessedly an adaptation of the method by which property in shipping is dealt with, and as it was impossible to ignore the patent fact that, as applied to shipping, that method acts to perfection, it became necessary for objectors of the first class to deny that there was any such analogy between the two descriptions of property as would admit of the same method being applied to both. Accordingly, we find the Royal Commission of 1868, par. 65 of their report, arguing that "The system is inapplicable to dealings with land, because ships are legally divided into sixty-four parts. The share in a ship is an abstract thing; the ship itself a concrete thing, and of the simplest kind, and unalterable so long as it remains in existence at all. But land is concrete altogether. There is no such thing as an abstract acre of land, and the same acre may vary in appearance and description at different times." Here a false conclusion is drawn from erroneous premisses [sic]. So far from a "ship being unalterable so long as it remains in existence at all," it is a matter of everyday occurrence for ships to be altered both in rig and hull— schooners converted into barks, barks into ships, and vice versa; hulls cut in two, lengthened or shortened, increasing or diminishing the tonnage, and necessitating a fresh register. Again, shares in shipping are no more "abstract things" than undivided