By the common law an infant (i.e. a person less than twenty-one years old) was bound by contracts made for “necessaries,” i.e. such commodities as a jury holds, and the court thinks Disability. they may reasonably hold, suitable and required for the person’s condition; also by contracts otherwise clearly for his benefit; all other contracts he might confirm or avoid after coming of age. An extremely ill-drawn act of 1874 absolutely deprived infants of the power of contracting loans, contracting for the supply of goods other than necessaries, and stating an account so as to bind themselves; it also disabled them from binding themselves by ratification. The liability for necessaries is now declared by legislative authority in the Sale of Goods Act 1893; the modern doctrine is that it is in no case a true liability on contract. There is an obligation imposed by law to pay, not the agreed price, but a reasonable price. Practically, people who give credit to an infant do so at their peril, except in cases of obvious urgency.
Married women were incapable by the common law of contracting in their own names. At this day they can hold separate property and bind themselves to the extent of that property—not personally—by contract. The law before the Married Women’s Property Acts (1882 and 1893, and earlier acts now superseded and repealed) was a very peculiar creature of the court of chancery; the number of cases in which it is necessary to go back to it is of course decreasing year by year. But a married woman can still be restrained from anticipating the income of her separate property, and the restriction is still commonly inserted in marriage settlements.
There is a great deal of philosophical interest about the nature and capacities of corporations, but for modern practical purposes it may be said that the legal powers of British corporations are directly or indirectly determined by acts of parliament. For companies under the Companies Acts the controlling instrument or written constitution is the memorandum of association. Company draftsmen, taught by experience, nowadays frame this in the most comprehensive terms. Questions of either personal or corporate disability are less frequent than they were. In any case they stand apart from the general principles which characterize our law of contract.
The rights created by contract are personal rights against the promisors and their legal representatives, and therefore different in kind from the rights of ownership and the like Contract and property. which are available against all the world. Nevertheless they may be and very commonly are capable of pecuniary estimation and estimated as part of a man’s assets. Book debts are the most obvious example. Such rights are property in the larger sense: they are in modern law transmissible and alienable, unless the contract is of a kind implying personal confidence, or a contrary intention is otherwise shown. The rights created by negotiable instruments are an important and unique species of property, being not only exchangeable but the very staple of commercial currency. Contract and conveyance, again, are distinct in their nature, and sharply distinguished in the classical Roman law. But in the common law property in goods is transferred by a complete contract of sale without any further act, and under the French civil code and systems which have followed it a like rule applies not only to movables but to immovables. In English law procuring a man to break his contract is a civil wrong against the other contracting party, subject to exceptions which are still not clearly defined.
Authorities.—History: Ames, “The History of Assumpsit,” Harvard Law Rev. ii. 1, 53 (Cambridge, Mass. 1889); Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 2nd ed., ii. 184-239 (Cambridge, 1898). Modern: Pollock, article “Contract” in Encyclopaedia of the Laws of England (2nd ed., London, 1907), a technical summary of the modern law; the same writer’s edition of the Indian Contract Act (assisted by D. F. Mulla, London and Bombay, 1905) restates and discusses the principles of the common law besides commenting on the provisions of the Act in detail. Of the text-books, Anson, English Law of Contract, reached an eleventh edition in 1906; Harriman, Law of Contracts (second edition, 1901); Leake, Principles of the Law of Contract (fifth edition by Randall, 1906); Pollock, Principles of Contract (eighth edition, 1910, third American edition, Wald’s completed by Williston, New York, 1906). O. W. Holmes’s (justice of the Supreme Court of the United States) The Common Law (Boston, Mass. 1881) is illuminating on contract as on other legal topics, though the present writer cannot accept all the learned judge’s historical conjectures.
(F. Po.)
CONTRACTILE VACUOLE, in biology, a spherical space filled with liquid, which at intervals discharges into the medium; it is found in all fresh-water groups of Protozoa, and some marine forms, also in the naked aquatic reproductive cells of Algae and Fungi. It is absent in states with a distinct cell-wall to resist excessive turgescence, such as would lead to the rupture of a naked cell, and we conclude that its chief function is to prevent such turgescence in unprotected naked cells. It fulfils also respiratory and renal functions, and is comparable, physiologically, to the contractile vesicle or bladder of Rotifers and Turbellarians. In many species it is part of a complex of canals or spaces in the protoplasm.
See M. Hartog, British Association Reports, and Degen, Botanische Zeitung, vol. lxiii. Abt. 1 (1905) (see also Protozoa; Protoplasm).