First, we may notice that even in later times the immediate heirs of a man were regarded as having a claim to property, a kind of potential ownership, during the lifetime of the _pater_, and that inheritance is regarded merely as a continuation of ownership (_dominium_);[101] and in accordance with this view we find the practice of holding an inheritance in joint ownership, the co-heirs bearing the name of _consortes_.[102] Secondly, the earliest testaments of which we have knowledge were public acts performed before the _comitia_ of the people. The most ancient was the patrician form of testament—the _testamentum comitiis calatis_—effected at the _comitia curiata_ which were summoned (_calata_) twice a year for this purpose.[103] The original purpose of this public testament is obscure. It is possible that originally it took place when there was no direct heir (_suus heres_) to receive the inheritance, and that it was accompanied by some form of adoption of a successor. The person adopted might have been the son belonging to another family; although of such a procedure there is no further trace in Roman law.[104] The publicity of the act and the infrequency of its occurrence show how exceptional a will must have been, and that the normal mode of succession was that by intestacy. But we have no warrant for saying that this testament at the _comitia calata_ was an act of private legislation and was permitted by the assembled burgesses. The gathering was perhaps merely a form, and the persons assembled may have acted only as witnesses;[105] but the very publicity would have made it almost impossible to pass over a son of the family, unless there were expressed grounds for his disinheritance. The second kind of public will was the military testament (_in procinctu_),[106] but our authorities leave us in doubt as to whether this testament could be made in any gathering of the soldiers prepared to meet the enemy and in any place, or whether it was a formal act possible only in the great gathering of the _exercitus_ in the Campus Martius—that gathering which was finally organised as a legislative assembly, existed by the side of the assembly of the Curies, and came to be known as the _comitia centuriata_. In the first case it may have been an old patrician form of testament, an informal will permitted in an emergency, perhaps to enable a childless soldier to transmit his inheritance. We do not know whether it had absolute validity, or only a validity dependent on circumstances, such as the absence of direct heirs, or the satisfaction of religious conditions approved by subsequent pontifical scrutiny; on this hypothesis the comrades of the testator could hardly have acted other than as witnesses to the will.