ATTAINMENT OF MAJORITY.
(Vol. viii., pp. 198. 250.)
I greatly regret that there should be anything in the matter or manner of my Query on this subject to induce Mr. De Morgan to reply to it more as if repelling an offence, than assisting in the investigation of an interesting question on a subject with which he is supposed to be especially conversant. I can assure him that I had no other object in writing ninth numerically instead of literally, or in omitting the words he has restored in brackets, or in italicising two words to which I wished my question more particularly to refer, than that of economising space and avoiding needless repetition; and in the use of the word "usage" rather than "law," of which he also complains, I was perhaps unduly influenced by the title of his own treatise, from which I was quoting. But however I may have erred from exact quotation, it is manifest I did not misunderstand the sense of the passage, since Mr. De Morgan now repeats its substance in these words,—
"I cannot make out that the law ever recognised a day of twenty-four hours, beginning at any hour except midnight."
This is clearly at direct issue with Ben Jonson, whose introduced phrases, "pleaded nonage," "wardship," "pupillage," &c., seem to smack too much of legal technology to countenance the supposition of poetic license.
But had I not accidentally met with an interesting confirmation of Ben Jonson's law of usage, or usage of law, I should not have put forth my Query at all, nor presumed to address it to Professor De Morgan; my principal reason for so doing being that the interest attaching to discovered evidence of a forgotten usage in legal reckoning, must of course be increased tenfold if it should appear to have been unknown to a gentleman of such deep and acknowledged research into that and kindred subjects.
In a black-letter octavo entitled A Concordancie of Yeares, published in and for the year 1615, and therefore about the very time when Ben Jonson was writing, I find the following in chap. xiii.:
"The day is of two sorts, natural and artificiall: the natural day is the space of 24 hours, in which time the sunne is carried by the first Mover, from the east into the west, and so round about the world into the east againe."
"The artificiall day continues from sunne-rising to sunne-setting: and the artificiall night is from the sunne's setting to his rising. And you must note that this natural day, according to divers, hath divers beginnings: As the Romanes count it from mid-night to mid-night, because at that time our Lorde was borne, being Sunday; and so do we account it for fasting dayes. The Arabians begin their day at noone, and end at noone the next day; for because they say the sunne was made in the meridian; and so do all astronomers account the day, because it alwayes falleth at one certaine time. The Umbrians, the Tuscans, the Jewes, the Athenians, Italians, and Egyptians, do begin their day at sunne-set, and so do we celebrate festivall dayes. The Babylonians, Persians, and Bohemians begin their day at sunne-rising, holding till sunne-setting; and so do our lawyers count it in England."
Here, at least, there can be no supposition of dramatic fiction; the book from which I have made this extract was written by Arthur Hopton, a distinguished mathematician, a scholar of Oxford, a student in the Temple; and the volume itself is dedicated to "The Right Honourable Sir Edward Coke, Knight, Lord Chiefe Justice of England," &c.
A. E. B.
Leeds, Sept. 10.