class were considered freedmen, and not slaves, but they had no independent political rights.

Justinian (Lib. 1, 6) mentions many modes of manumission "aut ex sacris constitutionibus in sacrosanctis ecclesiis aut vindicta, aut inter amicos, aut per epistolam, aut per testamentum, aut aliam quamlibet ultimam voluntatem." There is also the mode by census mentioned by Gaius and Ulpian (A.D. 220).

The manumission by Vindicta was probably the most ancient as well as the most usual. It was also the method pointed out by law and conferred absolute irrevocable freedom. The slave was brought before the magistrate (Plaut. Mid. iv, 1, 15), and the lictor laying the vindicta or festuca (stalk or stem) upon him declared him free ex jure quintium (Pers. 5, 175), whereupon the master who had meantime held the slave said, "hunc hominem liberum volo," and then let him go "e manu emisit." The manumission "ex sacris constitutionibus," or as it has been otherwise called, "sacrorum causâ," seems to point only to the grounds of manumission, as the form might be in the usual manner.

The modes "inter amicos," or "per epistolam," which are mentioned by Gaius as well as Justinian, did not confer legal freedom, but were mere expressions of the master's wish, which he might at any time recall until the more formal mode by vindicta had been adopted. The Lex Juliana Norbana, however, gave the prætor the power of protecting persons who had been so made free and they acquired the state called Latinitas, which has been just mentioned, and which might be enlarged into the state of "Civitas" by marriage, and a compliance with the terms imposed by the Ælia Scutia (Gaius 1, 30, 66).

There was also a manumission by census. If a master on the taking of a census allowed his slave to return himself as a freedman he was thenceforth free, or at least became so on the celebration of the lustrum or purification of the people which was always performed by one of the censors in the Campus Martius after the usual quinquennial taking of the census. The last mode of manumission was by "Testament" or any expression of the deceased's last wish on the subject. By this

Freedom was also a frequent subject of purchase from the State during the time of the first Emperors, by persons who had not been slaves, but by foreigners, and more especially Jews, who were anxious to become Roman citizens. And thus

we find in the 21st and 22nd ch. of Acts, v. 27, 28, that when St. Paul was brought before the chief captain at Jerusalem, the chief captain "asked him if he were a Roman, and he said Yea. And the chief captain answered with a great sum obtained I this freedom-And Paul said but I was free-born."

Slaves were allowed the rights of burial, because as the Romans regarded slavery as a mere social institution, they considered that death put an end to the distinction between slaves and freemen. We find that they were sometimes buried in the same tomb with their masters. A master was compelled to bury his slave; and if a man buried the slave of another he had a right of action against the master for the expenses of the

funeral.

Of slavery among other nations little is known. Tacitus, indeed, who wrote about A.D. 100, tells us (De Mor. Germ. 24, 25) that among the Germans slaves were generally attached to the soil and employed in agriculture that as a general rule they could not be sold, beaten, chained, or imprisoned, and therefore, perhaps, as has been before remarked of the Greek captives taken in war, they may be considered to have been under a feudal rather than under a slave discipline. If, however, a German, as was not at all unusual, staked his freedom on a cast of the dice and lost, he then became a subject of sale like any other chattel.

In Africa, perhaps, both in ancient and modern times, slavery has ever been marked by the strongest and most disgusting features (Cæsar de Bel. Jugurth., c. 91); and it would appear that it prevailed there from the first peopling of that unexplored country. On the coast of Guinea a great trade in slaves was carried on by the Arabs some hundred years before the Portuguese embarked in that traffick. In 651 the Mahomedan Arabs of Egypt so harassed the King of Ethiopia that he agreed to send them annually by way of tribute a vast number of Nubian slaves into Egypt.

THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT SLAVERY.

401

As a concluding remark, it may be added that up to the present day the black and white species cannot contract marriages with each other except under the penalty of barrenness in the third generation at farthest, thus proving that the Divine institution of a difference between the two races still continues to exist. This same law seems to prevail in regard to many other human species. For information on this subject see Bollaert's Introduction to the Anthropology of the New World in the present volume. In opposition to his views, however, I feel fully convinced that the entire human species sprung from the first man, Adam, and that the inferiority of race arose from the curse passed on Canaan, followed up by the subsequent curses to which I have before only briefly alluded.

D D

XXX.-Blood-Relationship in Marriage considered in its Influence upon the Offspring. By ARTHUR MITCHELL, A.M.,

M.D., F.R.S.E., F.A.S.L., etc., Deputy Commissioner in
Lunacy for Scotland.

A series of quotations might easily be given to show that there exists a remarkable difference of opinion as to the influence which consanguinity in the parentage exercises upon the offspring.

Further,—such a series of quotations could not be made, on anything like an extended scale, without finding that Scotland is pointed at as occupying a peculiar position in relation to the subject.

THE Voice of the people in this country, whatever its practice may do, condemns blood-alliances, and declares them to be productive of evil. Educated and uneducated may be said to entertain this belief equally; and as every one has considerable opportunities of testing its accuracy by personal observation and experience, the probability of its being simply and wholly a traditional error becomes small. Even among professional men, there is scarcely less unanimity in this general condemnation. But their wider knowledge and habits of closer observation lead often to qualifications and doubts; while occasionally we find an investigator wholly denying the evil, and characterising the dread of such unions as "a superstitious fear".

If we carefully study the literature of the subject we shall find that it abounds in unsupported assertion, and that important conclusions are very often made to rest on a basis which is undefined or clearly too narrow. Yet, somehow, in spite of this, we rise from such a study with little doubt as to the reality of some evil effect, though we may feel strongly that its character and its measure are not well-known, and that of the nature of those conditions by which it is evidently modified we are still very ignorant.

Both general and professional opinions on this subject rest, in no small degree, on a peculiar and faulty kind of evidence. When we are presented with the question,-"Does consanguinity in parentage appear to injure the offspring?" memory searches for instances of unions of kinship, from the history of which the answer is to be framed. Now, it is certain that all