ABSTRACT
Perhaps in no department of jurisprudence is the relation between Ancestor-worship and law more clearly shown than in the law of adoption. Failing male issue, adoption was the most general method of providing for the continuity of Ancestor-worship. It was, as Fustel de Coulanges says, “a final resource to escape the much dreaded misfortune of the extinction of a worship.” 1 Death without an heir to perpetuate the worship of ancestors was, as I have said, considered to be the greatest filial impiety. So, in the case of the failure of male issue, it was the duty of a house-head to acquire a son by adoption.
