Book excerpt: Excerpt from A Treatise on the Law of Contracts, Vol. 1 of 2 The present work is intended, primarily, as a text-book for students, but it is by no means restricted in its scope or design to such a use. Its purpose is not only to sketch an elementary outline of the law relating to simple contracts, but to elucidate and systematize, as far as practicable, the general law applicable to the subject; in the hope that it may serve alike the student and the practitioner. It is believed, that such a work is now needed by the profession, for new circumstances and exigencies so modify and expand every department of jurisprudence, as to require new expositions of the law, however valuable preceding treatises may have been. The plan of the present work has been to render cases sub ordinate to principles, and, instead of pursuing the common method of merely digesting the various authorities, to throw the main body Of them into the notes, and to incorporate those only in the text, which seemed to afford the best illustrations of the doctrine under consideration. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.