CONSANGUINITY, or Kindred, is defined by the writers on the subject to be vinculum personarum ab eodem stipite descendentium, that is, the connection or relation of persons descended from the same stock or common ancestor. This consanguinity is either lineal or collateral. Lineal consanguinity is that which subsists between persons of whom one is descended in a direct line from the other, while collateral relations descend from the same stock or ancestor, but do not descend the one from the other. Collateral kinsmen, then, are such as lineally spring from one and the same ancestor, who is the stirps, or root, as well as the stipes, trunk, or common stock, whence these relations branch out. It will be seen that the modern idea of consanguinity is larger than that of agnatio in the civil law, which was limited to connection through males, and was modified by the ceremonies of adoption and emancipation, and also than that of cognatio, which did not go beyond the sixth generation, and was made the basis of Justinian’s law of succession. The more limited meaning of consanguinei was brothers or sisters by the same father, as opposed to uterini, brothers or sisters by the same mother. The degrees of collateral consanguinity were differently reckoned in the civil and in the canon law. “The civil law reckons the number of descents between the persons on both sides from the common ancestor. The canon law counts the number of descents between the common ancestor and the two persons on one side only,” and always on the side of the person who is more distant from the common ancestor. A recent American writer, Lewis Morgan (Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family, 1871), has given the terms used to denote kindred in 139 languages. The Mongoloids, the Malays, ...