legislature of the State of Vermont, you would find nothing to give you any help. If, however, you should look in the decisions of the courts, both of the United States and of the State of Vermont, you would find cases, probably many of them, covering this particular situation, and you would find the rule to be laid down as law, that an infant (and by an infant we mean anyone under twenty-one years) is not liable on his contracts, except for necessities, and then only in a quasi-contractual action for their reasonable value. Applying the law to the problem, you would be obliged to admit the legality of the infant's claim, and if you did not refund the money to him, he would be entitled to sue for it in a court. Three winter suits are clearly not necessaries at one time for an infant with an income no greater than $1000 per year. This is a comparatively simple problem. Now let us take another case somewhat more difficult. You live in New Jersey near the plant of an airplane manufacturing company. Machines are constantly being tried out, and they circle over your premises within four or five hundred feet from the ground. You have several children who are using your back yard as a playground and you are much alarmed, fearing that an airplane may fall in the yard and kill or injure a child. You wish to ascertain your rights. You look in the Constitution of the United States, and of the State of New Jersey. You will find nothing in either about airplanes. You look in the acts of Congress and the laws of the legislature of the State of New Jersey. You will find nothing there to help you. You look in the decisions of the courts, both of the United States and of the State of New Jersey. You will find nothing there. You look in the text-books, and, except in the most recent, in all probability you will find nothing there in regard to airplanes. You may search the recent legal publications and you will find articles discussing in a purely theoretical way this interesting topic. You study recent legislation and you will find stray instances of attempts to deal with aerial matters. For example, Connecticut has a statute on airplanes. In fact, your whole search will be most interesting. All you will find, however, is not law in New Jersey, but is simply theory, based on common law principles or statutes having no force in New Jersey. Should you then conclude that you have no rights, that the law cannot help you? Perhaps not. If you turn to treatises relating to the ownership of land as developed in the English common law and as applied by the courts in the United States, you will find that the word "land" is often used as practically synonymous with realty or ground or soil, and you will also find that it includes everything attached to the realty or growing on it. As is commonly said, land has an indefinite extent upward as well as downward, the old books using the Latin maxim: "Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum usque ad orcum." (To whomsoever the soil belongs, he owns also to the sky and to the depths.)

There are three houses in a row on Smith Street, Nos. 1, 3 and 5. Mary Jones lives in No. 1, and Sarah Green in No. 5. They are friends, and accordingly arrange to stretch their clotheslines from their rear second-story windows across the back yard of No. 3. Under common law principles, this is a trespass upon No. 3. Should Mary Jones and Sarah Green continue to do this for the required time, usually twenty years, they would acquire by prescription a permanent right to stretch clotheslines over lot No. 3. When the owner of lot No. 3 wished to erect a ten-story building covering all of his lot, he would be seriously interfered with by the right acquired by his two adjoining neighbors. He could have protected himself by proper action in a court when the offense was first committed. Could not, therefore, the court take this principle of the common law as to the ownership of land and apply it to the airplane case? If the owner of lot No. 3 could prevent the owners of lots Nos. 1 and 5 from stretching clotheslines across his land, could you not prevent the airplane from crossing your land, although it is five hundred feet above the surface of the soil? Twenty years' continuation of that practice would interfere with your ability to build a Woolworth building twenty-five years from now should you desire to do so. It is simply taking an old principle of law recognized for centuries, and applying it to new conditions. This is what we mean when we say that the principles of common law are capable of indefinite expansion; that the common law is always growing, or, as Mr. Justice Holmes puts it, it is the product of "the felt necessities of the time." As soon, however, as you have secured an injunction from the court preventing the airplane factory from practicing its machines over your land, all of the other property owners in the neighborhood of the factory decide to protect their rights, with the result that no airplane can leave the factory through the air. Does this mean that the airplane factory must move, and probably be subjected to the same annoyances in its new location in a short time? We are coming to realize that airplanes are necessities. When a necessity and a principle of law cannot exist side by side, something must be done to remedy an intolerable situation. The illustration here used presents what in the course of a few years, undoubtedly, will become an intolerable situation, unless remedied in some way. It has been suggested that we must modify our principles of the ownership of land, and give airplanes the right of free passage over the land of any person, when a certain distance in the air, far enough up to cause no great amount of danger or annoyance. Such a change in the law would have to be accomplished by the State legislature or by an act of Congress for such territory as Congress has jurisdiction over. No doubt, legislation along such lines may be expected soon. It will be simply a repetition of a situation created by a leading case in New York in 1902.

In Roberson v. The Rochester Folding Box Company, 171 New York 538, the suit was brought on behalf of a living person, a young lady, to restrain a flour company from putting her likeness upon prints advertising its flour. Mr. Justice Parker, writing the opinion of the court, held that there was no principle of law which would authorize the court to issue an injunction restraining this unauthorized use of a photograph. This created the unfortunate situation in the State of New York of allowing anyone to make use of another's photograph without that person's consent, for advertising or other purposes. The court, in its opinion, admitted the unfortunateness of the situation, observing that "The legislative body could very well interfere and arbitrarily provide that no one should be permitted for his own selfish purpose to use the picture or the name of another for advertising purposes without his consent. In such event no embarrassment would result to the general body of the law, for the rule would be applicable only to cases provided for by statute. The courts however, being without authority to legislate, are required to decide cases upon principle, and so are necessarily embarrassed by precedents created by an extreme, and therefore unjustifiable application of an old principle. The court below properly said that: 'While it may be true that the fact that no precedent can be found to sustain an action in any given case is cogent evidence that a principle does not exist upon which the right may be based, it is not the rule that the want of a precedent is a sufficient reason for turning the plaintiff out of court,' provided (I think should be added)," Mr. Justice Parker continues, "there can be found a clear and unequivocal principle of the common law, which either directly or mediately governs