The limitation by which a series of civil rights is destroyed is spoken of as a “lessening of _caput_” (_capitis deminutio_). It is in every case an infringement of rights already possessed by the individual. Now the loss of public rights could only follow on a loss of citizenship; but this is not the diminution but the annihilation of _caput_, and could not therefore in the earliest stage of Roman law (when there was no status recognised but that of citizenship) be called a _capitis deminutio_. The term must have been wholly confined to a loss of private rights, i.e. to the loss of the rights conveyed by the control of a _familia_.[115] Thus the _adrogatus_ suffers a lessening of _caput_ by passing into the power of another. But a change from a higher to a lower status (even when the higher did not imply active rights) may at an early period have been regarded as an infringement of _caput_. We know, for instance, that the _datio in mancipium_ of a son of a family was thought (at what period is uncertain) to involve it, because the child passes from a better to a worse station, although in his former condition he had no active rights of his own. It is stranger still that, certainly at an early period, the fact of a woman’s passing into her husband’s power (_conventio in manum_) was held to have this consequence. It is one that is scarcely intelligible in the case of a _filia familias_ who passes from one _potestas_ to another; but in the case of a woman only under the burden, lighter and ever tending to be more relaxed, of the _tutela_ of her relatives, it is a natural though not strictly legal conception.[116] Some other applications of the system are still more artificial, and are perhaps creations of late Roman jurists who came to consider that the essence of a loss of _caput_ was a change of status (_status commutatio_).[117] Thus adoption, which is the change from one _potestas_ to another, and even manumission, which is the freedom from power, were supposed to involve it. These applications contain some historical truth only in so far as both these changes involve a temporary mancipation.