which usually began with the birth of the subject person, might also be brought about by processes of law, called adoption and arrogation. When a person who was sui juris placed himself under the patria potestas of another, the process was called arrogation. In earlier times it took place before an assembly of the people: afterward it was effected by a written order of the emperor. As all property of the arrogated person became at once the property of his new father, the latter was required to show, in a previous examination, that he was not influenced by sinister motives, and to give security that he would not abuse the power he was acquiring. When, on the other hand, a person already under a father's power was transferred to the patria potestas of another, the process was called adoption, though this term was also used in a wider sense, so as to include arrogation. Adoption in the narrower sense required only the assent of the two fathers, the natural and the adoptive father. The proceedings took place before the prætor, and ended in a collusive suit. The adoptive father as plaintiff claimed the child as his under the law of the Quirites; the natural father, instead of resisting the claim, acquiesced in it; and it was of course sustained by the prætor's judgment. The effect on the adopted person was to sever all legal ties which bound him to his original family. He was not only released from the former patria potestas, but he lost all rights of inheritance which before belonged to him. By the

law he was regarded and treated exactly as if he had always been a member of the family into which he had come by adoption. The patria potestas was so momentous a thing, it affected so long and so deeply the interests of the person subject to it, that adoption, the creation of a new patria potestas, could not fail to be an important institute of Roman law. In English law it is quite the contrary. Indeed, it can hardly be called an institute of English law. If a man undertakes to rear a child not his own, the law will hold him to his undertaking; it will compel him while he keeps the child to make decent provision for his wants; this is the sum and substance of what we have on this head.

But if the patria potestas could be created, it could also be terminated, by an artificial process. This process, however, illustrates very strikingly the feeling of the Romans as to the patria potestas, showing how deeply founded they held it to be in the natural relation of father and son. The father could not by a simple act of his own will release the son from his control. For this purpose he must sell him out of his own hands into that state of mancipium or qualified slavery of which we have spoken. Even then the father's power was not destroyed: it was suspended during the existence of the mancipium; but if the mancipium ceased, if the son was set free by the person who held him in that condition, the father's right revived. If he sold him again into the same state, and he was

again set free from it, the father's right revived again. It was not until he had sold him three times over, that he used up his right of control beyond the possibility of a revival. This, then, was the form by which the son was liberated from the patria potestas. He was sold by the father to a friend, who at once manumitted him. He was then sold a second time, and a second time manumitted. But, when he was sold the third time, it was with a pledge that the buyer, instead of manumitting him, should sell him back to the father; and the father finished the ceremony by manumitting him, as he was now able to do, the patria potestas having been extinguished by the thrice-repeated sale. This process was called emancipatio, because it was e mancipio, from the formal condition of mancipium, that the son passed into his final condition of a man sui juris.

The changes here described-adoption, arrogation, emancipation-all involve a deminutio capitis, the minima capitis deminutio. This seems only natural in the case of arrogation, for there a person who be fore was his own master puts himself under the absolute control of another person. But it does not seem so clear in the case of adoption, where a man simply passes from the control of one person to the similar control of another. And as to emancipation, where a man escapes from the control of another and becomes his own master, we might expect that this would be re

garded as an amplificatio capitis rather than a deminutio. It must be observed, however, that by adoption and by emancipation a man lost all rights which belonged to him as a member of his original family, especially his right of inheritance as a member of that family. And it was doubtless this loss of previously-existing rights that led the Roman jurists to regard every change of family as a capitis deminutio. It should seem, too, that emancipation was looked upon with some disfavor by the Romans, that it was not regarded as generally desirable, and was not generally practised. There was a stigma in the very form: the emancipated person must fall three times into the quasi-slavery of the mancipium before he could be free from the father's power.

In the next lecture we shall finish the law of family relations, discussing the agnate family, the law of marriage, and the law of guardianship.

LECTURE VI.

LAW OF FAMILY RELATIONS (CONTINUED).

THE AGNATE FAMILY consisted of such cognates (blood-relations) as could trace their lineage through males alone (father, grandfather, etc.) up to a common male ancestor, whose family-name they all bore, and to whose patria potestas they would have been subject had he lived to their time. But persons brought into a family by adoption became agnates; and those who passed out of it either by adoption or emancipation ceased to be agnates (though still cognates). By the earlier law intestate inheritance was confined to the agnate family. Gradually, however, cognates who were not agnates (emancipated persons, mothers under the freer marriage, etc.) were admitted to certain rights of inheritance. And finally in Novel 118, Justinian set up cognation, in place of agnation, as the basis of intestate inheritance. [Maine's opinion that agnation as a legal institute, wherever found (among Hindoos, early Germans, etc.), implies the former existence of a patria potestas like the Roman; and that both institutes belonged to the primitive or patriarchal constitution of society.]

MARRIAGE required no ceremony to make it valid; but in early Rome it usually began with confarreatio, a religious rite, or with coëmptio, a formal purchase of the wife (by a kind of mancipatio). These brought the wife in manum viri, so that she stood to her husband in loco filiae, with dependence in person and property much the same as by the old common law. If married without them, she did not come into the agnate family or under the control of her husband, until brought there by a usus of one year; but this usus might be defeated by an absence of three nights in the year from her husband's residence. In the time of Cicero the stricter marriage had ceased to be the prevailing one: in that of Gaius it could only be secured by coëmptio. In the Justinian law we find only the freer marriage: the wife remains an agnate of her old