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1 The reason of this rule has induced us to assert in our Code a constitution, providing that if a testator has children, grandchildren, or greatgrandchildren who are lunatics or idiots, he may, after the analogy of pupillary substitution, substitute certain definite persons to them, whatever their sex or the nearness of their relationship to him, and even though they have reached the age of puberty; provided always that on their recovering their faculties such substitution shall at once become void, exactly as pupillary substitution proper ceases to have any operation after the pupil has reached puberty.
In 1718 George Boone took up four hundred acres in Oley, or, to be exact, in the subdivision later called Exeter, and there he lived in his log cabin until 1744, when he died at the age of seventy-eight. He left eight children, fifty-two grandchildren, and ten greatgrandchildren, seventy descendants in all English, German, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish blended into one family of Americans. *
The demand for enduring woods replaced the market for green pine and men planned homes to accommodate their greatgrandchildren and not to attract prospective buyers before the plaster cracked. Naturally, forwardlooking men like Stuart Thario and myself, though we had every respect for culture, were not swamped by this sudden urge to encourage the effervescent side of life.
But the Emperors would not allow so unnatural a wrong to endure without sufficient correction, and accordingly, as people are, and are called, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of a person whether they trace their descent through males or through females, they placed them altogether in the same rank and order of succession.
In order, however, to bestow some privilege on those who had in their favour the provisions of the ancient law as well as natural right, they determined that grandchildren, greatgrandchildren, and others who traced their descent through a female should have their portion of the inheritance diminished by receiving less by onethird than their mother or grandmother would have taken, or than their father or grandfather, paternal or maternal, when the deceased, whose inheritance was in question, was a woman; and they excluded the agnates, if such descendants claimed the inheritance, even though they stood alone.
We extirpated the salivary glands of dogs in order to find out if they would slobber without them. We cut off the tails of mice to discover if the operation affected their greatgrandchildren. We decapitated, emasculated, malnourished, and poisoned rodents against whom we had no personal animus for no other reason than to keep an elaborate apparatus in use.
And as it was thought just that grandchildren and greatgrandchildren should represent their father, it seemed consistent that the inheritance should be divided by the number of stems, and not by the number of individuals, so that a son should take onehalf, and grandchildren by another son the other: or, if two sons left children, that a single grandchild, or two grandchildren by one son, should take onehalf, and three or four grandchildren by the other son the other.
By the constitution which we have published, and by which we have altogether deprived it of validity, we have provided that in case of the survival of grandchildren by a daughter, greatgrandchildren by a granddaughter, or more remote descendants related through a female, the agnates shall have no claim to any part of the estate of the deceased, that collaterals may no longer be preferred to lineal descendants; which constitution we hereby reenact with all its force from the date originally determined: provided always, as we direct, that the inheritance shall be divided between sons and grandchildren by a daughter, or between all the grandchildren, and other more remote descendants, according to stocks, and not by counting heads, on the principle observed by the ancient law in dividing an inheritance between sons and grandchildren by a son, the issue obtaining without any diminution the portion which would have belonged to their mother or father, grandmother or grandfather: so that if, for instance, there be one or two children by one stock, and three or four by another, the one or two, and the three or four, shall together take respectively one moiety of the inheritance.
15 By the ancient law too, which favoured the descent through males, those grandchildren only were called as family heirs, and preferred to agnates, who were related to the grandfather in this way: grandchildren by daughters, and greatgrandchildren by granddaughters, whom it regarded only as cognates, being called after the agnates in succession to their maternal grandfather or greatgrandfather, or their grandmother or greatgrandmother, whether paternal or maternal.
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