text:  Now in these and all the other laws of any given period we find in the first place from their particularity a great additional help towards becoming familiar with the times in which they were passed; we learn the names of various officers courts and processes; and these when understood (and I suppose always the habit of reading nothing without taking pains to understand it ) help us from their very number to realize the state of things then existing; a lively notion of any object depending on our clearly seeing some of its parts and the more we people it so to speak with distinct images the more it comes to resemble the crowded world around us