Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 24.pdf/23

 The-'&.een Bag living men. In the same line .ot.creative effort, a comparable genius.' is'-found in Josef Kohler, Professor;of. Law at the University of Berlii). 'Both men are encyclopedias of -strange learning; both possess unu^nal. -and unexpected lin guistic, aii&jlitistic accomplishments; and.bo^ir.are great dynamic forces in the. development of law in their respec tive countries. In dealing with per sonalities of this kind who tower over the ordinary standards of capacity and accomplishment, it is difficult to find an avenue that will lead to any internal meaning. Such men are felt rather than understood. Objective particulars are in them selves sterile, but yet the conventional approach may be useful. Briefly, then, Mr. Wigmore was born in 1863 at San Francisco. Both his academic and his legal training were had at Harvard. He was at the Boston bar for two years after leaving the uni versity. Later he became Professor of Anglo-American Law at Fukuzawa Uni versity at Tokyo, and still later a member of the bar in Illinois. Among his labors in Japan, aside from his pro fessorial duties, was a treatise on Jap anese land tenures, and a revision of the Civil Code under authority of the Japanese government. For more than ten years last past, he has been Dean of Northwestern University School of Law. His great philosophical master piece on Evidence appeared in 1904-5, and is, of course, well known to the entire legal profession. So much and more may be found in any Who's Who, but dates, names, and places tell nothing of the man. It is possible to set down similar arid facts concerning his extensive professional and executive labors, his valuable con tributions to law reviews, his researches into legal history, his multiplied other

activities, and yet we should entirely miss the distinguishing factors of this uncommon personality. But why un common, and why a personality? A man who can read in a half-dozen Continental languages on some obscurity in mediaeval legal history until the clock calls him to a directors' meeting of the Legal Aid Society; who can write a fugue and then pass to a lecture on Torts; who can preside over a faculty meeting and then bury himself in the Leges Barbarorum; who can plan a budget and then find satisfaction in the Laocoon; who can smooth over a diffi culty for a Freshman, and then at once become absorbed in the Seleucidae; who can exhaust a proposition of current law while receiving a dozen callers; who can investigate an Etruscan antiquity after analyzing the Workmen's Com pensation Act; — we say that a man who does these unusual things by way of daily routine is an uncommon person. Of course this is only a characterization, but it is typical of the diversified activity and learning of the man. Here is a man who has mastered a surprising bulk of the arts, sciences, histories and philosophies, and seems not ever to have forgotten anything. What exaggeration of physiological function will account for such abnor mal capacity? By what superior en dowment of mind has be been able to make his own so great a field of knowl edge? We are driven either to the notion of the Superman, or the assumption that he has been able to live a mortal life without taking time either for sleep or food. Equally remarkable is the fact that Mr. Wigmore, while never living through a moment that can be called idle, never appears to be busy. His mental organization is not the small, noisy kind. It is an immense dynamo