The judgment established the legal principle that the possession of incorporeal rights requires exclusivity and cannot be the subject of legal possession until the acquisition process is complete.

Miller, J.

1. The plaintiff prays for an injunction to prevent the defendants from cutting a channel from a tank from which he waters some of his fields, so as to deprive him of the water. He alleged, inter alia, that the defendants were threatening to construct a dam to prevent the water from flowing to his fields, but this they denied.

2. The District Munsif, as I understand him, held that the plaintiff has a right to a supply of water from the pond in question, to the exclusion of the defendants and on that ground issued the injunction prayed for. The District Judge holds that the plaintiff has no right to the water of the pond, though he had been in the habit of taking it through a channel for sometime not exactly determined but less than twenty years. He dismissed the suit.

3. In Second Appeal it is contended that on the finding of the District Judge we ought to hold that the plaintiff, though he has not by prescription acquired a right to take the tank water through his channel, is nevertheless entitled, having been for sometime taking it in that way to prevent the defendants, who have also no right to take the water, from taking it so as to deprive him of his supply and in support of this contention reliance is placed on Kondapa Rajam Naidu v. Devarakonda Suryanarayema (1911) I.L.R., 34 Mad., 173. It is perhaps unfortunate that in that case the learned Judges have referred to the right for which protection was there claimed as "in the nature of an incorporeal right in process of acquisition." It seemed to me during the argument before us that reliance was sometimes placed on this observation as suggesting the existence in the eye of the law, of what I may call a partially acquired easement, as though the period required for the acquisition of an easement were a period of gestation, during which the easement gradually acquires form and life by a process of growth within the womb of prescription, and during which it is capable of suffering an injury.

4. It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that this is not the law. That is made clear by Farweil, J., in Greenhalgh v. Brindley (1901) 2 Ch., 324. You have your easement or you have nothing. You have nothing more for 19 years enjoyment than for 19 months except possibly a greater prospect of success. What is growing and gradually ripening is not your easement, but your chance of success, and that is not a thing which the law protects. But I do not think that the learned Judges had in their minds anything in the nature of an inchoate or embryonic easement Their decision was based on the view that in many cases incorporeal rights are as much capable of possession as rights to corporeal hereditaments. This means that you may have an enjoyment of a thing incorporeal without title, an enjoyment which may properly be called possession, and which will be protected in the same way that possession without title of corporeal things is protected. The question in each case will therefore be not whether the plaintiff has been enjoying the benefit which he seeks to retain, but whether he has possession of it.

5. In the opinion of Sir Frederick Pollock, no mean authority on question of possess] in, easements "are not capable in an exact sense of being possessed. The enjoyment which may in time ripen into an easement is not possession and gives no possessory right before the due time is fulfilled. The only possession that can come in question is the possession of the dominant tenement itself"-Pollock on Torts, 8th Edition, page 375; and in Holmes Common Law it is pointed out that where an easement has been actually created, whether by deed or prescription, although it is undoubtedly true that any possessor of the dominant estate would be protected in its enjoyment, it has not been so protected in the past on the ground that the easement was in itself an object of possession but by the survival of precedents" founded, as he elsewhere explains on ideas which permitted the acceptance of a th