OF THE UUMAN FAMILY. 27 



It will not be necessary to pursue further the minute details of the Roman 

 system of consanguinity. The principal and most important of its features have 

 been presented, and in a manner sufficiently special to have rendered it perfectly 

 intelligible. For simplicity of method, felicity of description, distinctness of 

 arrangement into lines, truthfulness to nature, and beauty of nomenclature, it is 

 incomparable. It stands pre-eminently at the head of all the systems of relation- 

 ship ever perfected by man, and furnishes one of the many illustrations that what- 

 ever the Roman mind had occasion to touch, it placed once for all upon a solid 

 foundation. 



From its internal structure it is evident that this system, in its finished form, was 

 the work of the civilians. We have reasons, also, for believing that it was not 

 used by the people except within narrow limits. Its rigorous precision and 

 formality, not to say complication of arrangement, tends to this conclusion; and 

 the existence and use of common terms for near kindred, after its establishment, is 

 still more decisive. It is not even probable that the common people employed 

 either of the four special terms for uncle and aunt, or that either term for uncle or 

 for aunt was used promiscuously. The disappearance of all of these terms from 

 the modern Italian language, and the reappearance in it of the Greek common 

 term for uncle and aunt, deiog, Oeia, in the Italian Zio, ZUi,'Yendevs it conjectuTable 

 at least, that the Greek term, in a Latinized form, was used among the ancient 

 Romans ; or, it may have been, that they retained the original descriptive phrases. 

 Consobrinus, we know, was in use among the people as a common term for cousin,^ 

 and nepos for a nephew^ as weU as a grandson. In addition to the special terms 

 heretofore named were sohrinus, sohrina,'' a contraction of consohrinus for cousin, 

 which were sometimes applied to a cousin's children ; and proprior sohrinus, sobriiia, 

 to indicate a great uncle's son and daughter. If the people used the common 

 terms, while the civilians and scholars ' resorted to the formal legal method, it 

 would not create two systems, since one form is not inconsistent with the other, and 

 the latter was developed from the former. From the foregoing considerations it 

 may be inferred that the Roman form was not perfected merely to describe the 

 several degrees of consanguinity, but for the more important object of making 

 definite the channel, as well as the order of succession to estates. With the need 

 of a code of descents, to regulate the transmission of property by inheritance, would 

 arise the further necessity of specializing, with entire precision, the several lines, 

 and the several degrees of each. A descriptive method, based upon particular 

 generalizations, became indispensable to avoid the more difficult, if not impossible, 

 alternative of inventing a multitude of correlative terms to express the recognized 

 relationships. After the kindred of ego had been arranged in their appropriate 

 positions, by the method adopted by the civilians, a foundation Avas laid for a code 

 of descents for the transmission of property by inheritance. 



It remains to notice briefly the affineal relationships. The Latin nomenclature 



' Pandects, Lib. XXXVIII. tit. x. = Eutropius, Lib. TIL cap. i. 



' Nam mihi sobrina Ampsigura tua mater fuit, pater tuus, is erat frater patruelis meus. Plautus. 

 Com. Pcfiiuilus, Act V. Scene 11. 109, 



