ADOPTION

(Lat. adopto, I adopt.) In the Civil Law, signifies the admi ion of a stranger to the rights and privileges of a son. Adoption was a common custom among the Romans, by whose law a relation, nearly resembling that of master and slave, was constituted between father and son; so that a child, adopted from one family into another, pa ed, in effect, from the power of his parent to that of his adopter. Adoption is said, in Just in i an's institutes, to be of two sorts: the one, also called arrogation, where a person, independent of parental control, is adopted into a family by virtue of an imperial rescript; the other, where, by the authority of a magistrate, a child pa es from one family to another. But unle the adopter po e ed a certain right by blood over the person adopted (as a grandfather), the parental power of the father was not extinguished. Adoption exists in the jurisprudence of various countries, where derived from the civil law;. as in the German states and in France: in the latter country, the person adopting must be one having neither children nor other legitimate descendants. [s. 28]