10 ` rsnnnkn anronrnn.
estates whatsoever, situate in the county of Limerick and in the city of
Limerick," to certain trustees therein named and their heirs. At the
time of making the will he had no real estate in the county of Limerick,
but he had a small real estate in t_he city of Limerick and considerable
real estate in the county of Glare. The plaintiff concluded that he
was at liberty to show by his parol evidence that the real estate inthe
city of Limerick was inadequate to meet the charges of the will, that
the testator intended his estates in Clare also to pass under the
. same devise. He offered to prove by parol that the estates in the
county of Clare were devised to him in the draught of the will, that the
draught was sent to a conveyancer to make certain alterations not
. aifecting the estates in the county of Clare; and that by mistake he
erased the words "county of Clare," and that the testator afterwards
executed the will without noticing the erasure. The court held that
. the evidence was inadmissible. In delivering judgment the chief jus-
tice said that cases of latent ambiguity range themselves into two
separate classes:
“The first class is when his description of the thing devised or of the dev-
isee is clear upon the face of the will, but upon the death of the testator it
is found that there are more than one estate or subject—matter of devise, or
more than one person, whose description follows out and fills the words used
· in the will. The other class of cases is that in which the description con-
tained in the will of the thing intended to be devised, or of the person who is
intended to take, is true in part, but not true inevery particular."
The court then proceeded as follows:
"But the case now before the court does not appear to fall within either of
these distinctions. There are no words in the will which contains an imper-
feet, or, indeed, any description of the estates in Clare. The present case is
rather one in which the plaintiff does not endeavor to apply the description
contained in the will to the estates in Clare, but in order to make out such in-
tention is compelled to introduce new words and a new description into the
body of the will itself. * * * This, it is manifest, is l10b merely calling
in the aid of extrinsic evidence to apply the intention of the testator, as it is
to be collected from the will itself,‘to the existing state of his property; it is -
calling in extrinsic evidence to introduce into the will an intention not ap-
parent upon the face of the will itself. It is not simply removing a difficulty
arising f1·om a defective or mistaken description: it is making the will speak
upon a subject on which it is altogether silent, and is, in effect, filling up a
blank which the testator _might have left in his will. It amounts, in short,
by the admission of parol evidence, to the making of a new devise for the tes-
tator which he is supposed to have omitted."
These extracts from this opinion are directly in point. There is
no latent ambiguity in this case which falls under either of the classes
“ mentioned by Chief Justice Tmonn. The devise is of lands which,
upon the face of the will, are well described. Now, if the testator
had two tracts of land, answering equally well the description, this
would raise a latent ambiguity, and it would be competent by parol
evidence to show which of the two was meant. Or if he owned but
one tract of land, which, insome respects, was truly described in the
devise, but in other respects not, parol evidence might be received to