in this way. Natural kindred was the
groundwork, the leading and determining idea; but, by one of those
legal fictions which have such an influence on all institutions,
adoption was in certain cases allowed to count as natural kindred.[2]

The usage of all language shows that community of blood was the leading
idea in forming the greater and smaller groups of mankind. Words like
_phylon, genos, gens, natio, kin,_ all point to the natural family as
the origin of all society. The family in the narrower sense, the
children of one father in one house, grew into a more extended family,
the _gens_. Such were the Alkmaionidai, the Julii, or the Scyldingas,
the real or artificial descendants of a real or supposed forefather.
The nature of the _gens_ has been set forth often enough. If it is a
mistake to fancy that every Julius or Cornelius was the natural kinsman
of every other Julius or Cornelius, it is equally a mistake to think
that the _gens Julia_ or _Cornelia_ was in its origin a mere artificial
association, into which the idea of natural kindred did not enter. It
is indeed possible that really artificial _gentes_, groups of men of
whom it might chance that none were natural kinsmen, were formed in
later times after the model of the original _gentes_. Still such
imitation would bear witness to the original conception of the _gens_.
It would be the doctrine of adoption turned the other way; instead of a
father adopting a son, a number of men would agree to adopt a common
father. The family then grew into the _gens_; the union of _gentes_
formed the State, the political community, which in its first form was
commonly a tribe. Then came the nation, formed of a union of tribes.
Kindred, real or artificial, is the one basis on which all society and
all government have grown up.

Now it is plain, that as soon as we admit the doctrine of artificial
kindred--that is, as soon as we allow the exercise of the law of
adoption--physical purity of race is at an end. Adoption treats a man
as if he were the son of a certain father; it cannot really make him
the son of that father. If a brachycephalic father adopts a
dolichocephalic son, the legal act cannot change the shape of the
adopted son's skull. I will not undertake to say whether, not indeed
the rite of adoption, but the influences and circumstances which would
spring from it, might not, in the course of generations, affect even
the skull of the man who entered a cert