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 years, there is apparent a gradual declination in the sound value of their fruits. His posthumous writings are decidedly in contrast, and to their disadvantage, with the studies of his earlier years. He rose up out of a national law to an universal law, but as his ideas became more general they also at the last became more tenuous. As a realist confining himself to facts which he apprehended with the intuition of genius, and dealing with “practica” he was incomparable; but when he attempted the flight into an alien country he left behind him the substantial products of a vigorous and fertile intellect to enter a domain as empty as the “Begriffshimmel” created by him for the Romanists.

Jhering’s claim to great distinction may be said to rest, in summary, on the following grounds:

1. He universalized Roman law, approving at once its reception, and the changes which had been made in it in the middle ages, and thus took a middle ground which compromised