Papinian has said:[116] ‘Prescription raised by long possession is not customarily recognized as valid in the acquisition of places known to international law as “public”’. As an example, to illustrate this point, he cites a shore some part of which had been occupied by means of a building constructed on it. But if this building should be destroyed, and some one else later should construct a building on the same spot, no exception could be taken to it. Then he illustrates the same point by the analogous case of a res publica. If, for example, any one has fished for many years in a branch of a river, and has then stopped fishing there, after that he cannot prevent any one else from enjoying the same right that he had.

Wherefore it appears that Angeli[117] and his followers who have said that the Venetians and Genoese were able to acquire by prescription certain specific rights in the gulfs of the sea adjacent to their shores, either are mistaken, or are deceiving others; a thing which happens all too frequently with jurists when they exercise the authority of their sacred profession not for justice and law, but in order to gain the gratitude of the powerful. There is also an opinion of Marcianus, already cited above in another connection, which, when carefully compared with the words of Papinian,[118] can have no other interpretation than the one formerly adopted by Johannes and Bartolus,* and now accepted by all learned men,[119] namely, that the jus prohibendi is in effect only while occupation lasts; it loses its force if occupation