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94 or eldest Oidor, until a new viceroy was appointed; and enjoyed a number of other privileges, which left them but little reason to regard the position of any of their countrymen as more advantageous, (even in a pecuniary sense,) than their own. In the more extensive Colonies, branches of the Audiencia were established in the provinces most remote from the seat of government, but these exercised no independent jurisdiction, and an appeal lay from them, in all cases, to the Audiencia of the capital.

The "Recopilacion de las Leyes de las Indias," or General collection of the laws of the Indies, is the name given, in Spanish jurisprudence, to that heterogeneous mass of statutes, by which, during the last three centuries, the decisions of these tribunals were supposed to be determined. These statutes were, originally, nothing more than Decrees upon different subjects, emanating from the King, or from the Council of the Indies, often contradictory, and generally unconnected with each other, but bound up at last together, and published in four folio volumes. No pains having been taken to class, or reduce them to any thing like system, they were full of the most glaring inconsistencies; and, as every new case became the subject of a new Decree, which, from the moment of its publication, had the force of law, it is hardly possible to conceive a more complete chaos than that presented by the legislative code