estor,--they are everywhere employed
to attest the sacredness of the family-relation; and therefore they
acquire prominent significance and importance, whenever the continuous
existence of the Family is endangered by a change in the person of its
chief. Accordingly we hear most about them in connection with demises
of domestic sovereignty. Among the Hindoos, the right to inherit a
dead man's property is exactly co-extensive with the duty of
performing his obsequies. If the rites are not properly performed or
not performed by the proper person, no relation is considered as
established between the deceased and anybody surviving him; the Law of
Succession does not apply, and nobody can inherit the property. Every
great event in the life of a Hindoo seems to be regarded as leading up
to and bearing upon those solemnities. If he marries, it is to have
children who may celebrate them after his death; if he has no
children, he lies under the strongest obligation to adopt them from
another family, "with a view," writes the Hindoo doctor, "to the
funeral cake, the water, and the solemn sacrifice." The sphere
preserved to the Roman _sacra_ in the time of Cicero, was not less in
extent. It embraced Inheritances and Adoptions. No Adoption was
allowed to take place without due provision for the _sacra_ of the
family from which the adoptive son was transferred, and no Testament
was allowed to distribute an Inheritance without a strict
apportionment of the expenses of these ceremonies among the different
co-heirs. The differences between the Roman law at this epoch, when we
obtain our last glimpse of the _sacra_, and the existing Hindoo
system, are most instructive. Among the Hindoos, the religious element
in law has acquired a complete predominance. Family sacrifices have
become the keystone of all the Law of Persons and much of the Law of
Things. They have even received a monstrous extension, for it is a
plausible opinion that the self-immolation of the widow at her
husband's funeral, a practice continued to historical times by the
Hindoos, and commemorated in the traditions of several Indo-European
races, was an addition grafted on the primitive _sacra_, under the
influence of the impression, which always accompanies the idea of
sacrifice, that human blood is the most precious of all oblations.
With the Romans, on the contrary, the legal obligation and the
religious duty have ceased to be blended. The necessity of solemnising
the _