but for vacancy precisely because it never vested private property in the state, taking the basis of private property to be a factum and not a right. Such a very gap in nature is the reason that Blackburn can decide in 1889 to address the question of whether the colony was previously settled or not as one of law as opposed to fact, a decision congruent with a set of prescriptions of which Blackstone, who, with Coke, developed the modern notion of property in land, helping to turn usages into properties which could be rented, sold or willed, noted, Pleased as we are with possession, we seem afraid to look back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defect in our title; or at least we rest satisfied with the decision of the laws in our favour. As our great colleague in Kaliningrad used to say, you must not take it too far. Or as R. Torrens’ own ink-stained March fly is made to say for us, A banker’s fortune, consisting of paper, cannot be taken at all, without the taker’s submitting to the conditions of production and intercourse of the country taken; whereas obviously, if the taker assigns another value to that indiscernible country or paper, he need not enter into the conditions of the former to any extent, which thus become utterly annihilate, English law providing for the table-biting circumstance whereby it may be brought within cognizance by its own fiction if not actually. Windeyer’s client, who we must admit was not up to his reputation, was accused of nothing less than fraudulently intending the disinherision of Our Said Lady the Queen. He had leased a part of a sixty acre grant in Newcastle given to Arthur Charles Fitzroy Dumaness, by the Crown, on the part and in the voice of the Crown it is provided nevertheless, and we do hereby reserve to ourselves all such parts and so much of the said land as may hereafter be required for a public way or ways, . and also all stone and gravel, . and all land within one hundred feet of high water mark, . and also all mines of gold and silver, and of coals with full and free liberty and power to search for, dig, and take away the same. Sic ob cit, ladies. See I do deal in small change; se tutto il co. I will repeat, au pied de cette mouche, that when the defendant mined for coal, the Crown, in the person of the Attorney General, held that the coal mines and veins of coal were in the hands and possession of Our Said Lady the Queen, and at last Held, the reserve created an exception in the grant, and therefore that the veins of coal, being severable from the land, remained as a corporeal hereditament in the Crown, and were properly the subject of an information of intrusion, if I haven’t got that the wrong way around. Windeyer, identifying a form of tenure that had been abolished, indeed argued that property in England before the Norman conquest was effectively allodial, and that the Statute of Charles II returned it, except for the retention of the fiction as to all lands being held from the Crown, to its former state. Brown’s excavations, like the coal anciently buried to mark boundaries but preserving them even beneath the movements of successive epochs, brought suddenly into the light of the Southern Hemisphere the very internal limits of English feudal proprietary right as it lay across statutory and common law by the middle of the nineteenth century, so that, for the case in question, it was possible to cite statutes as old as the said subdivisional King of England and his collaterally milling daughter casting doubt upon the power of the Crown to make reservations, as well as numerous precedents for the Crown’s right to do so, as William and Mary reserving all idols above a certain size in New England — one could, as remains current, have gone back to Domesday, to the county of the Axton Hundred for instance, to take a random page, quidquid dignum memoria, thrice valued in the record between the English and the French reeve who holds it at farm, where it is forbidden to prune or exfoliate whatever falls in the King’s way, whether the responsible roots were to come out in Whitham, Milton-Under-Wychwood, Taddington, Nether Cott, Old Cleeve, Exton or Ixhill, Ash, Dodingtree, Fleamdyke, or Bagstone Hundred, if not less fantastically, in Kent, the same Hundred liable to render food and drink to the sovereign en route, over and above the fact that, though not a farm, and lacking the fairly controversial addition of swine, it already produced 40,000 herrings a year for the monks of the Archbishop, though paronyms are not precedent, and I have made the experience in myself that you can have too many cooks, notably in orig., though I will point out inter alia abundantibus that to bite here into the cindery apple of belongings is to touch on that not altogether far from contemporaneous distinction whereby, egg, cheese and bread being abscendens from lordship, these are defined as passing through a field of useless lordship, indeed each fleetingly non valet ova duo, and therefore not of personal servitude, which requires that salva rei substantia maneat, but rather of abuse: