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Code, it was not the immorality of the act itself, but rather the apprehended danger of the confusion of blood, whereby a person not in reality related to the ancestor might succeed to the worship.

The last grounds mentioned in the Taiho Code may be attributed to a similar cause. The hereditary nature of some diseases seems to have been early known, and the fear of ancestors’ blood becoming polluted was the chief cause of incurable disease being recognised as a ground of divorce.

According to the new Civil Code, two kinds of divorce are recognised, consensual and judicial, the former being effected by the arrangement of parties, while the latter is granted by law on various grounds which are specified in Article 813 of the Code. The majority of the grounds mentioned in the Taiho Code do not find a place in the new Code, and bigamy, adultery, desertion, cruelty, or gross insult, condemnation to punishments for certain offences, such as forgery, theft, embezzlement, sexual immorality, disappearance from residence, etc., are the principal grounds of divorce specified. Besides the grounds already mentioned, a judicial divorce is allowed in a case in which an adopted son has married the daughter of the persons who have adopted him, and they, for some reason, break off the adoption. Under such circumstances the man is entitled to dissolve the marriage.

From the comparison of the grounds of divorce mentioned in the Taiho Code and those enumerated in the new Civil Code, it will be seen that the law of divorce has undergone a great change, except the last ground, and the present law has only a slight connection with ancestor-worship.

Perhaps in no department of jurisprudence is the relation between ancestor-worship and the law more clearly shown than in the law of adoption. Failing male issue, it was considered the duty of a house-head to acquire a son by adoption, that being the most general method of providing for the continuity of ancestor-worship.

Many of the European legislatures which allow adoption limit the age of the adopter, the majority of them, such as the French, Italian, Australian, and German codes, fixing the lowest limit of an adopter’s age at fifty. The House Law of our Taiho Code provides that a person ‘having no child’ may adopt one from among his relatives within the fourth degree of kinship whose age does not exceed that which might have been attained by a son of the adopter’s own body. As long as a hope of having a male issue of blood—that is, the direct descendant of