inheritance
as one's own, or selling them, or cultivating or giving leases of the
deceased's estates, provided only one expresses in any way whatsoever,
by deed or word, one's intention to accept the inheritance, so long as
one knows that the person with whose property one is thus dealing has
died testate or intestate, and that one is that person's heir. To act as
heir, in fact, is to act as owner, and the ancients often used the term
'heir' as equivalent to the term 'owner.' And just as the mere intention
to accept makes an external heir heir, so too the mere determination not
to accept bars him from the inheritance. Nothing prevents a person who
is born deaf or dumb, or who becomes so after birth, from acting as heir
and thus acquiring the inheritance, provided only he knows what he is
doing.

TITLE XX. OF LEGACIES

Let us now examine legacies:--a kind of title which seems foreign to
the matter at hand, for we are expounding titles whereby aggregates of
rights are acquired; but as we have treated in full of wills and heirs
appointed by will, it was natural in close connexion therewith to
consider this mode of acquisition.

1 Now a legacy is a kind of gift left by a person deceased;

2 and formerly they were of four kinds, namely, legacy by vindication,
by condemnation, by permission, and by preception, to each of which a
definite form of words was appropriated by which it was known, and which
served to distinguish it from legacies of the other kinds. Solemn
forms of words of this sort, however, have been altogether abolished by
imperial constitutions; and we, desiring to give greater effect to the
wishes of deceased persons, and to interpret their expressions with
reference rather to those wishes than to their strict literal meaning,
have issued a constitution, composed after great reflection, enacting
that in future there shall be but one kind of legacy, and that, whatever
be the terms in which the bequest is couched, the legatee may sue for
it no less by real or hypothecary than by personal action. How carefully
and wisely this constitution is worded may be ascertained by a perusal
of its contents.

3 We have determined, however, to go even beyond this enactment; for,
observing that the ancients subjected legacies to strict rules, while
the rules which they applied to fiduciary bequests, as springing more
directly from the deceased person's wishes, were more liberal, we have
deemed it necessary to assim