Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/392

376 376 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. it can be separated and by the contract is to be separated, such a contract is not within the Statute. Such are contracts for the pur- chase of gravel, stones, timber, trees, and the boards and bricks of houses to be torn down and carried away." The result of our examination of the cases on this whole sub- ject is that neither the distinction between natural and artificial crops, nor between mature and immature crops, nor whether the buyer or the seller is to remove the thing sold from the ground, nor whether the subject of the sale would go to the heir or to the executor, or would or would not pass under a deed of the land it- self, has proved satisfactory. Each of these distinctions has been advanced in some case only to be denied in the next. Apparently it would have been wiser, or certainly more simple, to have held in the outset that the phrase " interest in land," meant some kind of title, right, or property in the land itself, some estate, either permanent or temporary, and not merely some transient or collateral use, benefit, or advantage from the land. Such a con- struction would have avoided the apparent inconsistency of allow- ing oral sales of annual crops to be valid, although they must remain several months in the ground, drawing nourishment and strength therefrom, and denying the same result to sales of trees, which stand only the same length of time, and without any per- ceptible increase in the mean time. It would also have avoided another equally unnecessary distinction of sustaining oral sales of other parts of the freehold, and denying the validity of sales of trees. But it is now probably too late to everywhere establish such a rule without legislative enactment. f Edmund H. Bennett. Boston, Jan. i, 1895.