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siding The rule by which the failure uf duty of the husband to the wife in the respect in question is measured, is that which permits the wife to sever her relations from him and his home and seek support elsewhere at his ex pense And no less reason must exist to justify her re fusal to accept a home and support provided for and offered to her by him. And such is the doctrine applica ble to a case of this character. " '

THE AEROLITH CASE. — An extremely novel case, probably the first one of the kind, is Goodard7'. Minchell, decided last October by the Supreme Court of Iowa, to the point that an aerolite weighing sixty-six pounds, which falls from the sky and is imbedded in the soil to a depth of three feet, is the property of the owner of the land on which it falls, rather than of the first person who finds it and digs it up. It would seem that as one owns all above his land as well as below the surface, this right includes the stone in question, and that its ownership should not be prejudiced simply because the article had changed its position. But the court did not put the decision on that ground. They observed : — "Through the action of the elements, wind and water, the soil of one man is taken and deposited in the field of another; and thus all over the country, we may say, changes are constantly going on. By these natural-causes the owners of the soil are giving and taking, as the wisdom of the controlling forces shall determine. By these operations one may be affected with a substantial gain, and another by a similar loss. These gains are of accretion, and the deposit becomes the property of the owner of the soil on which it is made. "A scientist of note has said that from six to seven hundred of these stones fall to our earth annually. If they are, as indicated in argument, departures from other planets, and if among the planets of the solar system there 5s this interchange, bearing evidence of their material composition, upon what principle of reason or authority can we say that a deposit thus made shall not be of that class of property that it would be if originally of this planet and in the same situation? If these exchanges have been going on through the countless ages of our planetary system, who shall attempt to determine what part of the rocks and formations of especial value to the scientist, resting in and upon the earth, are of meteoric acquisition, and a part of that class of property designated in argument as ' unowned things,' to be the property of the fortunate finder, instead of the owner of the soil, if the rule contended for is to obtain? It ts not easy to under stand why stones or balls of metallic iron, deposited as this was, should be governed by a different rule than ob tains from the deposit of boulders, stones, and drift upon our prairies by glacier action, and who would contend 1 People v. Pettit, 74 N. Y. 320 i N. Y. Cr R. 513.

People ex rcl. Douglas* u. Naehr,

that these deposits from floating bodies of ice belong, not to the owner of the soil, but to the finder? Their origin or source may be less mysterious, but they too are ' tell tale messengers ' from far-off lands, and have value for historic and scientific investigation. "It is said that the aerolite is without adaptation to the soil, and only valuable for scientific purposes. Nothing in the facts of the case will warrant us in saying that it was not well adapted for use by the owner of the soil as any stone, or. as appellant is pleased to denominate it, ' ball of metallic iron ' That it mav be of greater value for scien tific or other purposes may be admitted, but that fact has little weight in determining who should be its owner. We cannot say that the owner of the soil is not as interested in and would not as readily contribute to the great cause of scientific advancement as the finder, by chance or other wise, of these silent messengers. . . . "The subject of this controversy was never lost or abandoned. Whence it came is not known but under the natural law of its government it became a part of this earth, and we think should be treated as such It is said by appellant that this case is unique, that no exact pre cedent can be found, and that the conclusion must be based largely upon new considerations No similar ques tion has, to our knowledge, been determined in a court of last resort. In the American and English Encyclopedia of Law (vol. 15, p. 388) is the following language: 'An aerolite is the property of the owner of the fee upon which it falls. Hence a pedestrian on the highway, who is fust to discover such a stone, is not the owner of it, the high way being a mere easement for travel.' It cites the case of Maas -' Amana Soc, 16 Alb L. I. 76, and 13 Ir. L. T 381. each of which periodicals contains an editorial notice of such a case having been decided in Illinois, but no re ported case is to be found. Anderson's Law Dictionaiy states the same rule of law, with the same references, under the subject of ' Accretions ' In 20 Albany Law Journal, 299, is a letter to the editor from a correspondent, calling attention to a case determined in France, where an aero lite found by a peasant was held not to be the property of the 'proprietor of the field,' but that of the finder. These references are entitled of course to slight if any considera tion, the information as to them being too meagre to indi cate the trend of legal thought Our conclusions are an nounced with some doubts as to their correctness; but thev arise not so much from the application of known rules of law to proper facts as from the absence of defined rules for these particular cascs. The interest manifested has induced us to give the case careful thought. Our con clusions seem to us nearest analogous to the generallv accepted rules of law bearing on kindred questions, and to subserve the ends of substantial justice."

It would have been no more impudent in the finder to cut and claim the ice on Goodard's pond simply because the latter did not choose to avail himself of it. He will be claiming the " gentle rain from heaven" next.