limited to Mahommedans. At one time endeavour was made to administer the Mahommedan criminal law as the general territorial law of India, but it had constantly to be amended, and it was at length abolished and the penal code substituted. To be a Mahommedan, and so to claim to be governed by the Mahommedan law, it is necessary to profess the Mahommedan faith. Intestate succession. All that we find on the subject of intestate succession in the Koran are certain directions as to the shares which certain members of the family are to take in the estate of their deceased relative. So far as they go, these are rules of distribution--that is to say, they depend, not on consanguinity only, but on certain equitable considerations, by which rules founded on consanguinity are modified. But these latter rules, though nowhere laid down in the Koran, still play a large part in Mahommedan law. There can be no doubt that they represent the pre-existing Arabian custom, which it was not the intention of the Prophet to displace, but only to modify. The claimants under these rules take whatever is left after the specific shares assigned by the Koran to individual members of the family have been satisfied; if in any case there are no such shares, they take the whole. The Arabic term for this class of heirs is _asabah_, which literally means persons connected by a ligament. The term used by English writers is "residuaries," but this description of them has the disadvantage that it entirely loses sight of the connexion on which the claim to succeed is based. They would be more correctly described as the "agnates" of the deceased, but the term "residuaries" is too firmly established to be displaced. Those persons who take a share of the property, under the specific rules laid down in the Koran, we call "sharers," and this word has acquired a technical meaning; it is not used to describe those who can claim a portion of the estate in any other way. It is hardly likely that females, or relatives through females, had any claim to the succession under any Arabian custom, nor, except so far as they are made sharers, are they recognized by the Koran as having a title to succeed. The proper description of this class of persons is zavi-ul-arham, i.e. "uterine kindred," and they have, in default of other heirs, established a claim to succeed. English writers have erroneously called them "distant kindred," but distance has nothing to do with the matter.