the power to adopt whom he will gives him
more voice in the matter of his unnatural offspring than he ever had in
the selection of a more natural one.

The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family he
enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known at the
time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen occasions at first
some slight confusion among his acquaintance. This would be no worse,
however, than the change with us from the maid to the matron, and
intercourse would soon proceed smoothly again if people would only rest
content with one such domestic migration. But they do not. The fatal
facility of the process tempts them to repeat it. The result is
bewildering: a people as nomadic now in the property of their persons as
their forefathers were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day
to unadopt him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they
bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting
that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a future
transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that the practice
can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries. To foreigners
it proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance upon a man whom you
have not met for some time, you can never be quite sure how to accost
him. If you begin, "Well met, Green, how goes it?" as likely as not he
replies, "Finely. But I am no longer Green; I have become Brown. I was
adopted last month by my maternal grandfather." You of course apologize
for your unfortunate mistake, carefully note his change of hue for a
future occasion, and behold, on meeting him the next time you find he
has turned Black. Such a chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling to
your idea of his identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own.
The only persons who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with us
unhappy, individuals who possess the futile faculty of remembering faces
without recalling their accompanying names.

Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically. A
niece or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of course
be adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out of the
every-day run, as she could never be included in the household on strict
business principles.

The practice of adopting is not confined to child