In the year 1906 San Francisco was totally destroyed by fire.  The conflagration was caused by the friction of a pig scratching itself against an angle of a wooden building.  More than one hundred thousand persons perished, and the loss of property is estimated by Kobo-Dogarque at one and a half million drusoes.  On more than two-thirds of this enormous sum the insurance companies had laid bets, and the greater part of it they refused to pay.  In justification they pointed out that the deed performed by the pig was “an act of God,” who in the analogous instance of the express companies had been specifically forbidden to take any action affecting the interests of parties to a contract, or the result of an agreed undertaking.

In the ensuing litigation their attorneys cited two notable precedents.  A few years before the San Francisco disaster, another American city had experienced a similar one through the upsetting of a lamp by the kick of a cow.  In that case, also, the insurance companies had successfully denied their liability on the ground that the cow, manifestly incited by some supernatural power, had unlawfully influenced the result of a wager to which she was not a party.  The companies defendant had contended that the recourse of the property-owners was against, not them, but the owner of the cow.  In his decision sustaining that view and dismissing the case, a learned judge (afterward president of one of the defendant companies) had in the legal phraseology of the period pronounced the action of the cow an obvious and flagrant instance of unwarrantable intervention.  Kobo-Dogarque believes that this decision was afterward reversed by an appellate court of contrary political complexion and the companies were compelled to compromise, but of this there is no record.  It is certain that in the San Francisco case the precedent was urged.

Another precedent which the companies cited with particular emphasis related to an unfortunate occurrence at a famous millionaires’ club in London, the capital of the renowned king, John Bui.  A gentleman passing in the street fell in a fit and was carried into the club in convulsions.  Two members promptly made a bet upon his life.  A physician who chanced to be present set to work upon the patient, when one of the members who had laid the wager came forward and restrained him, saying:  “Sir, I beg that you will attend to your own business.  I have my money on that fit.”

Doubtless these two notable precedents did not constitute the entire case of the defendants in the San Francisco insurance litigation, but the additional pleas are lost to us.