by the children as soon as they are born; but according to the
custom of most provinces, the acquisitions made by him during his
lifetime are wholly his own, and can be transferred by him at
pleasure. A similar distinction was not unknown to Roman law, in which
the earliest innovation on the Parental Powers took the form of a
permission given to the son to keep for himself whatever he might have
acquired in military service. But the most extensive use ever made of
this mode of classification appears to have been among the Germans. I
have repeatedly stated that the _allod_, though not inalienable, was
commonly transferable with the greatest difficulty; and moreover, it
descended exclusively to the agnatic kindred. Hence an extraordinary
variety of distinctions came to be recognised, all intended to
diminish the inconveniences inseparable from allodial property. The
_wehrgeld_, for example, or composition for the homicide of a
relative, which occupies so large a space in German jurisprudence,
formed no part of the family domain, and descended according to rules
of succession altogether different. Similarly, the _reipus_, or fine
leviable on the re-marriage of a widow, did not enter into the
_allod_ of the person to whom it was paid, and followed a line of
devolution in which the privileges of the agnates were neglected. The
law, too, as among the Hindoos, distinguished the Acquisitions of the
chief of the household from his Inherited property, and permitted him
to deal with them under much more liberal conditions. Classifications
of the other sort were also admitted, and the familiar distinction
drawn between land and moveables; but moveable property was divided
into several subordinate categories, to each of which different rules
applied. This exuberance of classification, which may strike us as
strange in so rude a people as the German conquerors of the Empire, is
doubtless to be explained by the presence in their systems of a
considerable element of Roman law, absorbed by them during their long
sojourn on the confines of the Roman dominion. It is not difficult to
trace a great number of the rules governing the transfer and
devolution of the commodities which lay outside the _allod_, to their
source in Roman jurisprudence, from which they were probably borrowed
at widely distant epochs, and in fragmentary importations. How far the
obstacles to the free circulation of property were surmounted by such
contrivances, we hav