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general rule that adoption had its origin in ancestor-worship; and the stronger the belief in that practice among the people, the wider is the scope allowed for adoption by the law. The dissolution of adoption shows the same. Two kinds of dissolution are recognised by the Civil Code: the one, dissolution by consent; the other, dissolution by judicial decree.

Adoption may be dissolved for any cause, provided that the parties mutually agree; but for its compulsory dissolution an action must be brought by one of the parties on the basis of one of the grounds specified in Article 866 of the Civil Code. I will only mention the two grounds for dissolution which have a direct bearing upon ancestor-worship. One of them is that, ‘if the adopted person commits a grave fault of a nature to disgrace the family name or ruin the house property’ of the adoptive house, the adoptive parent may bring an action for dissolution of the adoptive tie, the reason for this rule being that the name of the ancestor’s house is sacred; and it is not only his legal right, but his moral and religious duty, to dissolve the tie. The adoptive house is not the house of the adopter alone, nor is it the house of the adopted, but it is the house which the adopter inherited from his ancestor and will leave to his descendants. It is the duty of every house-head to preserve it, and leave it unblemished.

Another ground for dissolution mentioned in the Code has reference to ‘Muko-yoshi,’ or adoption of a son-in-law, and in the case of the marriage of an adopted son with ‘kajo,’ or the ‘house-daughter.’ If the adopted son marry the daughter of his adopted father, and divorce or annulment of that marriage takes place, an action for the dissolution of adoption may be brought by one of the parties (Article 866, Civil Code). The reason for this last rule is that, if the adopted son, who is in most cases the legal presumptive heir, remains in the adoptive house, and perhaps takes a second wife from another family, the true blood of the ancestor will not be continued in the house. The ‘adoption of a son-in-law,’ as I have said before, was a custom based on the desire to retain the true blood of the ancestor in the family; and if the marriage of the house-daughter with the adopted son be dissolved, the intention of the adopter is thereby thwarted.

The law of succession seems to have passed through three stages of evolution: Firstly, the succession of sacra; secondly, the succession of status; and thirdly, the succession of property. Each stage of development did not form a distinct period in itself, but the later was gradually evolved out of the