mily relationship.

If the system of archaic law at which we are looking be one which
admits Adoption, we must add to the Agnate thus obtained all persons,
male or female, who have been brought into the Family by the
artificial extension of its boundaries. But the descendants of such
persons will only be Agnates, if they satisfy the conditions which
have just been described.

What then is the reason of this arbitrary inclusion and exclusion? Why
should a conception of Kinship, so elastic as to include strangers
brought into the family by adoption, be nevertheless so narrow as to
shut out the descendants of a female member? To solve these
questions, we must recur to the Patria Potestas. The foundation of
Agnation is not the marriage of Father and Mother, but the authority
of the Father. All persons are Agnatically connected together who are
under the same Paternal Power, or who have been under it, or who might
have been under it if their lineal ancestor had lived long enough to
exercise his empire. 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.
If a woman died unmarried, she could have no legitimate descendants.
If she married, her children fell under the Patria Potestas, not of
her Father, but of her Husband, and thus were lost to her own family.
It is obvious that the organisation of primitive societies would have
been confounded, if men had called themselves relatives of their
mother's relatives. The inference would have been that a person might
be subject to two distinct Patriae Potestates; but distinct Patriae
Potestates implied distinct jurisdictions, so that anybody amenable to
two of them at the same time would have lived under two different
dispensations. As long as the Family was an imperium in imperio, a
community within the commonwealth, governed by its own institutions of
which the parent was the source, the limitation of relationship to the
Agnates was a necessary security against a conflict of laws in the
domestic forum.

The Parental Powers proper are extinguished by the death of the
Parent, but Agnation is as it were a mould which retains their imprint
after