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The words which are represented as thus related by descent or cognation, do not always agree in sense; for it is incident to words, as to their authours, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country.
"I solemnly supplicate upwards of fifty pardons," said Mat; "bad manners to it for a stool! but, your honor, it was my own detect of speculation, bekase, you see, it's minus a leg a circumstance of which you waren't wi a proper capacity to take cognation, its not being personally acquainted with it. I humbly supplicate upwards of fifty pardons."
3 Loss of status of any kind ordinarily extinguishes rights by agnation, for agnation is a title of civil law. Not every kind of loss of status, however, affects rights by cognation; because civil changes cannot affect rights annexed to a natural title to the same extent that they can affect those annexed to a civil one.
"Cognation" is therefore a relative term, and the degree of connection in blood which it indicates depends on the particular marriage which is selected as the commencement of the calculation.
The words which are represented as thus related by descent or cognation, do not always agree in sense; for it is incident to words, as to their authors, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country.
If we begin with the marriage of father and mother, Cognation will only express the relationship of brothers and sisters; if we take that of the grandfather and grandmother, then uncles, aunts, and their descendants will also be included in the notion of Cognation, and following the same process a larger number of Cognates may be continually obtained by choosing the starting point higher and higher up in the line of ascent.
For as family heirs and those whom we have enumerated as equivalent to family heirs have a priority over all other claimants, it is clear that a great-grandson or great-great-grandson is preferred to a brother, or the father or mother of the deceased; and yet the father and mother, as we have remarked above, are in the first degree of cognation, and the brother is in the second, while the great-grandson and great-great-grandson are only in the third and fourth respectively.
It would be sounded high that he debased human nature, which has a "cognation," so the reverend and learned Doctor Cudworth calls it, with the divine; that the soul of man, immaterial and immortal by its nature, was made to contemplate higher and nobler objects than this sensible world, and even than itself, since it was made to contemplate God and to be united to Him.
We, however, have determined to follow a straightforward and simple path, and, preferring the mother to all other persons with a statutory title, to give her the entire succession of her sons, without deduction in favour of any other persons except a brother or sister, whether by the same father as the deceased, or possessing rights of cognation only; so that, as we have preferred the mother to all with a statutory title, so we call to the inheritance, along with her, all brothers and sisters of the deceased, whether statutorily entitled or not: provided that, if the only surviving relatives of the deceased are sisters, agnatic or cognatic, and a mother, the latter shall have onehalf, and all the sisters together the other half of the inheritance; if a mother and a brother or brothers, with or without sisters agnatic or cognatic, the inheritance shall be divided among mother, brothers, and sisters in equal portions.
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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