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When will the laws of heredity, and the by-laws of agnation result in an altruism, where human bloodshed is an unknown horror?
Each of these is essentially ancestor-worship, the ancestors being reckoned back through family groups, of higher and higher order, sometimes with strict reference to the principle of agnation, as in old Rome; and, as in the latter, it is intimately bound up with the whole organisation of the State.
In the Customs of Normandy, the rule applies to uterine brothers only, that is, to brothers by the same mother but not by the same father; and, limited in this way, it is a strict deduction from the system of Agnation, under which uterine brothers are no relations at all to one another.
2 The relation of agnation can also be established by adoption, for instance, between a man's own sons and those whom he has adopted, all of whom are properly called consanguinei in relation to one another. So, too, if your brother, or your paternal uncle, or even a more remote agnate, adopts any one, that person undoubtedly becomes one of your agnates.
In Agnation too is to be sought the explanation of that extraordinary rule of English Law, only recently repealed, which prohibited brothers of the half-blood from succeeding to one another's lands.
8 The degrees of agnation are also reckoned in the same manner; 10 It is certain that the part of the Edict in which the possession of goods is promised to the next of kin has nothing to do with the relationships of slaves with one another, nor is there any old statute by which such relationships were recognised.
In truth, in the primitive view, Relationship is exactly limited by Patria Potestas. Where the Potestas begins, Kinship begins; and therefore adoptive relatives are among the kindred. Where the Potestas ends, Kinship ends; so that a son emancipated by his father loses all rights of Agnation. And here we have the reason why the descendants of females are outside the limits of archaic kinship.
In the first of these WE discern the beginning of agnation and kinsmanship through the father, which still lingers in the 'couvee' of New Zealand tribes: while the second is a relic of the totem and fetish worship of plants. Now, in entire opposition to this modern inductive principle of research stands the philosophic Plato, whose account of primitive man is entirely speculative and deductive.
The Powers themselves are discernible in comparatively few monuments of ancient law, but Agnatic Relationship, which implies their former existence, is discoverable almost everywhere. There are few indigenous bodies of law belonging to communities of the Indo-European stock, which do not exhibit peculiarities in the most ancient part of their structure which are clearly referable to Agnation.
The Prætors early laid hold on Cognation as the natural form of kinship, and spared no pains in purifying their system from the older conception. Their ideas have descended to us, but still traces of Agnation are to be seen in many of the modern rules of succession after death.
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