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THE

AMERICAN AND ENGLISH

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LAW.

AGER. A Latin word signifying a field, land, soil, etc.1

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AGGRAVATED ASSAULT.-See the title ASSAULT AND BATTERY. AGGRAVATION.-See the titles DAMAGES; EXEMPLARY DAMAGES; EVIDENCE; and the various titles such as LIBEL AND SLANDER; TRESPASS, As to pleading, see the ENCYCLOPÆDIA OF PLEADING AND PRACTICE, title DAMAGES, and the various titles of that work, such as LIBEL AND SLANDER; TRESPASS, etc.

etc.

Matter of aggravation, correctly understood, does not consist in acts of the same kind and description as those constituting the gist of the action, but in something done by the defendant, on the occasion of committing the trespass, which is, to some extent, of a different legal character from the principal act complained of; as where the plaintiff declares in trespass for breaking and entering his dwelling-house, and alleges, in addition, that the defendant also destroyed his goods in the house, assaulted and beat his domestics, or debauched his daughter or servant.2

AGGREGATE. (As to the distinction between corporations aggregate and corporations sole, see the title CORPORATIONS (PRIVATE).)—This term signifies a number of things united into one.3

1. Alluvion. (See also the title ACCRETION, Vol. I., p. 467.)-In Municipality No. 2 v. Orleans Cotton Press, 18 La. 122, 36 Am. Dec. 624, upon the question of the right to alluvion, the Supreme Court laid stress upon the meaning of the term ager as used in the Roman codes defining this right. The court said: "The Roman legislator, instead of giving the more exact and scientific definition of our modern codes, announces with oracular brevity a great rule of natural equity: Præterea, quod per alluvionem agro tuo flumen adjecit jure gentium tibi acquiritur, which I translate as follows: Moreover, whatever the river has added to your land becomes yours by the law of nature (or nations).' I use the English word land instead of field, because it appears to me that the word ager in the text is employed in its primitive sense to signify land or soil in the abstract, without regard to any idea of property or to any particular form or size, or shape, precisely as it is in the Greek, from which it is derived (agros), and as it is in the compounds into which it enters both in Latin and several modern languages, such as agricultura, agricola, agrarius, and agrimensor. It will not be pretended that agriculture is confined in any language to the culture of a field without a house or other building upon it, as the word ager signified 2 C. of L.-1I

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according to Rodrigues and even the Roman Digest. The language itself furnishes internal evidence that such was its primitive meaning, for the earliest as well as the most useful of human arts, that which in a great measure feeds and clothes the great family of man, derives its name from that word in combination with another which signifies to cultivate, Again, alluvion is a right founded on natural law, in which the maxim certainly applies with all its force, that where the reason is the same, the law is the same; and would that law distinguish between two contiguous estates or tracts of land fronting on a watercourse, and equally liable to be wasted by its encroachments-deny to that which should have a building upon it the natural chances of accretion, while it gives it to the other? I think not, any more than agriculture should be taken to mean the tilling of a field on which no edifice exists. That the word ager was sometimes employed to signify something different there is no doubt, and so is 'land' in English; its primitive signification is soil, ground, but it sometimes means a country or territory, as the land of my fathers,' the land of Canaan.'"

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2. Hathaway v. Rice, 19 Vt. 107.

3. Aggregate Payments.-A city charter provided that every ordinance requiring work to Volume II.

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