they have ceased to exist. Hence comes the interest of Agnation
for the inquirer into the history of jurisprudence. 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. In Hindoo law, for example,
which is saturated with the primitive notions of family dependency,
kinship is entirely Agnatic, and I am informed that in Hindoo
genealogies the names of women are generally omitted altogether. The
same view of relationship pervades so much of the laws of the races
who overran the Roman Empire as appears to have really formed part of
their primitive usage, and we may suspect that it would have
perpetuated itself even more than it has in modern European
jurisprudence, if it had not been for the vast influence of the later
Roman law on modern thought. The Praetors 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. The exclusion of females and their
children from governmental functions, commonly attributed to the usage
of the Salian Franks, has certainly an agnatic origin, being descended
from the ancient German rule of succession to allodial property. 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rule of English Law, only recently repealed, which prohibited brothers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. 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. When it was transplanted to England, the English judges, who
had no clue to its principle, interpreted it as a general prohibition
against the succession of the half-blood, and extended it to
_consanguineous_ brothers, that is to sons of the same father by
different wives. In all the literature which enshrines the pretended
philosophy of law, there is