principal of that which he had borrowed. The Lex Pœtelia, passed about B. C. 325, liberated all the nexi then under liability, and interdicted the nexi obligatio forever afterwards (Cicero, De Republ. ii, 34; Livy, viii, 28). Here, as in the seisachtheia of Solon, the existing contracts were cancelled, at the same time that the whole class of similar contracts were forbidden for the future. But though the nexi obligatio was thus abolished, the old stringent remedy still continued against the debtor on loan, _as far as the principal sum borrowed_, apart from interest. Some mitigations were introduced: by a Lex Julia, the still more important provision was added, that the debtor by means of a cessio bonorum might save his person from seizure. But this cessio bonorum was coupled with conditions which could not always be fulfilled, nor was the debtor admitted to the benefit of it, if he had been guilty of carelessness or dishonesty. Accordingly, the old stringent process, and the addiction in which it ended, though it became less frequent, still continued throughout the course of Imperial Rome, and even down to the time of Justinian. The private prison, with adjudicated debtors working in it, was still the appendage to a Roman money-lender’s house, even in the third and fourth centuries after the Christian era, though the practice seems to have become rarer and rarer. The status of the _addictus debitor_, with its peculiar rights and obligations, is discussed by Quintilian (vii, 3); and Aulus Gellius observes: “Addici namque _nunc_ et vinciri multos _videmus_, quia vinculorum pœnam deterrimi homines contemnunt,” (xx, 1.) If the _addictus debitor_ was adjudged to several creditors, they were allowed by the Twelve Tables to divide his body among them. No example was known of this power having been ever carried into effect, but the law was understood to give the power distinctly. It is useful to have before us the old Roman law of debtor and creditor, partly as a point of comparison with the ante-Solonian practice in Attica, partly to illustrate the difference drawn in an early state of society between the claim for the principal and the claim for the interest. See the Abhandlung of Von Savigny in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy for 1833, pp. 70-103; the subject is also treated by the same admirable expositor, in his System des heutigen Römischen Rechts, vol. v, sect. 219, and in Beilage xiv, 10-11 of that volume.