A practical reason for this proceeding at once suggests itself if it has happened that the couple were childless and were the owners of property. It then becomes necessary for the elders of the clan to select an heir; and as an adopted heir--who must be a "spare" son of a relative--is obliged to separate himself from his own branch of the clan and to regard the dead man and his wife for the future as his proper parents, matters must be so arranged that he can become possessor of his adoptive father's spirit-tablet. As the dead man's spirit is not supposed to take up its abode in the tablet until he has been interred with the proper rites in the family graveyard, it is necessary, if his body is missing, to evoke and inter its spiritual representative. If this were not done, the adopted heir would be unable to carry on the ancestral rites except in an irregular way, and this might lead to serious legal difficulties later on in the event of another member of the clan disputing the genuineness of the adoption and heirship. A point worth noting in connection with ancestral worship and adoption is that (in this part of China at least) the mere fact of childlessness does not necessarily lead a man to adopt a son: it is childlessness combined with the ownership of property that induces him to do so. We will suppose that a man has obtained his share of the family inheritance; that it is too small to support him; that he has sold it to relatives and with the cash proceeds has gone abroad to make a living; that he returns as an old man, childless and penniless: this man will in all probability show no desire to adopt a son, nor indeed is it likely that he could succeed in doing so if he wished it. The ancestral worship will not suffer by his childless death provided he has brothers and nephews to perpetuate the family _sacra_. Even if it happens that he is actually the last of his house and that his death will bring the ancestral cult of his line to an abrupt conclusion, it is not likely that, for the sole purpose of carrying on the sacra, the last of the line will bestir himself to go through the formalities necessary for the adoption of a son. The fact is that the possession of property--especially landed property--is regarded in practice as an inseparable condition of the continuation of the ancestral rites. This theory is often expressed in the formula _mei-yü ch'an-yeh mei-yü shên-chu_--"no ancestral property, no ancestral tablets." If the spirits of the deceased ancestors have been so regardless of the interests of their descendants that they have allowed the family property to pass into the hands of strangers, it is thought that they have only themselves to blame if for them the smoke of incense no longer curls heavenward from the domestic altars. Indeed, there is a vague idea that as the family line dwindles and finally becomes extinct on the material plane, so on the spiritual plane the ancestral