evince a very strong desire on the part of the legislator to sustain
the sacredness and to magnify the importance of the family tie; and to
avail himself of those instinctive principles of obligation and duty
which so readily arise in the human mind out of the various relations
of the family state, in the plans which he formed for subduing the
impulses and regulating the action of his rude community.

He devoted great attention too to the institutions of religion. He
knew well that such lawless and impetuous spirits as his could never
be fully subdued and held in proper subordination to the rules of
social order and moral duty, without the influence of motives drawn
from the spiritual world; and he accordingly adopted vigorous measures
for confirming and perpetuating such religious observances as were at
that time observed, and in introducing others. Every public act which
he performed was always accompanied and sanctioned by religious
solemnities. The rites and ceremonies which he instituted seem puerile
to us, but they were full of meaning and of efficacy in the view of
those who performed them. There was, for example, a class of religious
functionaries called _augurs_, whose office it was to interpret the
divine will by means of certain curious indications which it was their
special profession to understand. There were three of these augurs,
and they were employed on all public occasions, both in peace and war,
to ascertain from the omens whether the enterprise or the work in
regard to which they were consulted was or was not favored by the
councils of heaven. If the augury was propitious the work was entered
upon with vigor and confidence. If otherwise, it was postponed or
abandoned.

The omens which the augurs observed were of various kinds, being drawn
sometimes from certain peculiarities in the form and structure of the
internal organs of animals offered in sacrifice, sometimes from the
appearance of birds in the sky, their numbers or the direction of
their flight, and sometimes from the forms of clouds, the appearance
of the lightning, and the sound of the thunder. Whenever the augurs
were to take the auspices from any of the signs of the sky, the
process was this. They would go with solemn ceremony to some high
place--in Rome there was a station expressly consecrated to this
purpose on the Capitoline hill,--and there, with a sort of magical
wand which they had for the purpose, one of the number would determine