Service

1.

Is sometimes that description of duty, inferior and even menial, which a servant is bound and expected to render; thus slaves were, in the constitution, described as persons held to service; apprentices are bound to service; domestics are engaged for service in the household.

2.

Service, and its plural, services, are used generally for any useful work, even for skilled or professional duty and exertion; as in the expressions, services of an attorney, or of a physician; contracts for personal service; skilled services.

3.

Service is sometimes used to designate one of the kinds of public duty, or a branch of employment, under government; as in the expressions, service in the army or navy; the civil service; military or naval service; the public service.

4.

In practice of courts, the word service includes various ways by which a paper may be communicated to the person to be affected by it, so as to render it operative. Various kinds are known, and the names and requisites to their sufficiency differ under various statutes; but the principal are: Personal service, which consists in delivering a copy of the process, summons, notice, order, or other paper to the individual himself sought to be charged with it, and leaving it with him. The paper is said to be served when a copy is delivand perhaps some in which the original must be delivered. Service by or upon attorney, which consists in delivering the copy to or leaving it at the office of the attorney of the party, in the manner prescribed by the statute or rule of court, and is more applicable to notices, orders, &c., in the course of a suit, than to summons or process. Service by publication, which is allowed in some cases to be made against non-residents, and is performed by publishing the paper to be served as an advertisement in newspapers designated in the order allowing the service, and mailing a copy of the paper to the last known address of the party; and this mode is allowable, by leave of statute, with respect to summons and process, though it is not equal to personal service as respects the effect of the judgment which can be founded upon it. Substituted service, which is some mode which, by local statute, may be employed instead of personal service, in some cases where that is impracticable, and service by publication is inappropriate.

5.

In feudal law, service was a general term for whatever tenants were bound to render to their lord in recompense for the lands they held of him. This service in original feuds was only twofold: to follow or do suit to their lord, in his courts in time of peace, and in his armies or warlike retinue in times of war. There gradually arose, however, a gi-eat variety of these services, some being of a personal nature, others not; some of an honorable, others of a menial or servile, character. They are now mostly disused and obsolete. Service of an heir. By the former law of Scotland, before an heir could regularly acquire a right to the ancestor's estate, he ought to be served heir, which was a form proceeding upon a writ, and including the decision of a jury, fixing the right and character of the heir to the estate of the ancestor. (Bell; Wharton.) But by Stat..37 & 38 Vict. ch. 94, § 9, passed in 1874, it is enacted that the personal right shall vest in the heir, without service or other procedure. Service of the ship. In the rule that or sickness incurred in the service of the ship, the phrase " service of the ship " is not confined in meaning to acts done for the benefit of the ship, or in the actual performance of the seaman's duty. A seaman is entitled to he cured, at the expense of the ship, of any injury received by him in executing an improper order, or inflicted upon him by the wrongful violence of an officer of the ship, in the exercise of his authority to punish.

Ringold v. Crocker, Abb. Adm. 344.