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.
It has just been stated that Primitive Jurisprudence, though it does not allow a Woman to communicate any rights of Agnation to her descendants, includes herself nevertheless in the Agnatic bond.
If he left no direct descendants living at his death, the nearest grade of the Agnatic kindred succeeded, but no part of the inheritance was given to any relative united (however closely) with the dead man through female descents.
Women and the descendants of women succeed to them, obviously on the principle that they lie outside the sacred precinct of the Agnatic brotherhood.
In a patriarchally governed society, the eldest son may succeed to the government of the Agnatic group, and to the absolute disposal of its property.
The Powers themselves are discernible in comparatively few monuments of ancient law, but Agnatic Relationship, which implies their former existence, is discoverable almost everywhere.
The Civil Law, as I have already stated for another purpose, calls to the inheritance only three orders of successors in their turn; the Unemancipated children, the nearest class of Agnatic kindred, and the Gentiles.
Here again it will be convenient to employ the Roman terms, Agnatic and Cognatic relationship.
It is clear that illegitimate children can have no agnates, for in law they have no father, and it is through the father that agnaticrelationship is traced, while cognatic relationship is traced through the mother as well.
The group of agnatic kinsmen are mentioned in Early Law and Custom, pp.
According to agnatic relationship they were second cousins, but according to cognatic relationship Laban was his maternal uncle, and such accordingly he is called in the sacred text (Gen.
Again, the Roman family and tribal system, with their principle of agnatic relationship, was in all probability part of their organisation for war: it was the secret of their strength.
Agnatic relationship is rigidly confined to the male lines, excluding the connections and descendants of females, upon the maxim, Mulier est finis familiae, though including unmarried females on the side of the father.
The former case offends against the principle of agnatic organisation, the latter against the cognatic.
The importance they attached to the agnatic family is largely explained by their ideas of the future life.
As they understood it, the pater familias had absolute power over his children and other agnatic descendants.
There was no proof that anything which ought to be called family-ownership existed among the Anglo-Saxons; there was no proof of the patriarchal gens, of the agnatic group.
Submitted to concrete tests of this character the evidence for the strictagnatic land-owning group in England became in Maitland's eyes very ghostly[23].
Even if it were proved that the Roman gens was a close agnatic group, and that the house community was the primitive unit of Roman society, we should not "force our reluctant forefathers through agnatic gentes and house communities.
It is a much more extended group than the modern family, embracing under the headship of the eldest valid male parent all agnatic descendants and all persons united to it by adoption, as well as slaves, clients, and other dependents.
But in many of these cases it seems probable that the parental rather than the agnatic system prevails, though the male line may take precedence.
Agnatic relationship "is in truth the connection between members of the family, conceived as it was in the most ancient times.
Such is the judgment of Leist, whose masterly account of the development of the Aryan agnatic conception proves that here as elsewhere the Roman and the Greek stood upon common ground.
Niyoga, the levirate, and similar expedients for supplying a male heir, as fictions, under the influence of the worship of male ancestors, for maintaining the agnatic family.
In some cases the agnaticsystem or father-right may have followed immediately upon the earlier stage of mother-right.
In fact, for the Romans and kindred Italic tribes, considerable evidence has been collected by various writers pointing, as they believe, to an early transition from the maternal to the cognatic or the agnatic system.
Partially under the influence of monogamy and the rise of modern forms of property, it has often been superseded by the parental and sometimes by the agnatic system, although this sequence is by no means invariable.
As the result of his inquiry, Westermarck rejects the hypothesis that kinship through the mother is a primitive and universal stage, though he does not substitute the agnatictheory in its place.
Among the historic Greeks the agnatic principle finds expression especially in the right of guardianship, which is transmitted in the paternal line.
A female, by her marriage, suffered what was technically called a loss of franchise or capital diminution (deminutio capitis), by which she forfeited her agnatic rights.
Agnation and agnatic kindred, as now defined, assume descent in the male line; but the persons included would be very different from those with descent in the female line.
It shows that property was hereditary in the gens, but restricted to the agnatic kindred in the female line.
Whether the wife forfeited her agnatic rights by her marriage, as among the Romans, I am unable to state.
It may be reasonably supposed that the same question had arisen in the Roman gentes, and was in part met by the rule that the marriage of a female worked a deminutio capitis, and with it a forfeiture of agnatic rights.
Such a change would leave the inheritance in the gens as before, but it would place children in the gens of their father, and at the head of the agnatic kindred.
Agnatic inheritance would be apt to assert itself in this condition of things.
This practical limitation of the inheritance to the nearest gentile kin discloses the germ of agnatic inheritance.
A woman by her marriage forfeited her agnatic rights, to which rule there was no exception.
The agnates nearest in degree had the preference; first, the brothers and unmarried sisters; second, the paternal uncles and unmarried aunts of the intestate, and so on until the agnatic relatives were exhausted.
Second, that the property should be distributed among the agnatic kindred of the deceased owner, to the exclusion of the remaining gentiles.
Descent among them was in the male line, property was inherited by the children of the owner instead of the agnatic kindred, and the family was now assuming the monogamian form.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "agnatic" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
