PROFESSOR OF COMMON AND STATUTE LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. VOLUME III. RIGHTS WHICH RELATE TO THINGS PERSONAL. Second Edition, Revised and Corrected. RICHMOND: PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR. SOLD TO THE WHOLESALE TRADE BY ANDERSON BROS., UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA. 1895. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1895, By JOHN B. Minor, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. PREFACE TO VOL. III. SECOND EDITION. THE first incomplete edition of this volume was printed more than fifteen years ago, with the confident expectation that the residue of the volume would be finished and put to press in a few months thereafter. Various circumstances, however, combined to disappoint the author's hope, and as time passed he saw reason to enlarge the plan and scope of the work, so that what was originally designed to occupy a space of about six hundred pages has now been with difficulty compressed within fourteen hundred. In order to keep the book within reasonable limits, it has been found necessary to pretermit two subjects of great and growing interest, namely, the law applicable to railroads and their vast traffic, and to telegraphs and their rapidly increasing communications. A number of excellent treatises on both subjects, however, are easy of access, and have been referred to in the last pages of the volume. The peculiar arrangement of this, like the other volumes of the Institutes, has been repeatedly adverted to, and is now not unfamiliar to a large portion of the profession; but as this volume may, and probably will, come into the hands of some who have not access to the other volumes, it will be expedient to transcribe from the preface to the first edition of Volume I. the explanation there given, and repeated in the subsequent editions, which is as follows: "The reader who opens these volumes for the first time cannot fail to be struck, and perhaps will be repelled, by the peculiar arrangement which, though familiar enough to those who, for the last thirty years, have pursued their legal studies at the University of Virginia, requires explanation. "The arrangement is designed to exhibit to the eye, on the page, not only the carefully digested order of the propositions, |