merely pass them over in silence, if he wished to leave his property to a stranger. For some time this provision had little effect, but a breach in the _patria potestas_ has really been made, and by the time of Pliny the Younger (61-115 A.D.), who describes the procedure in detail, the disinherited children were given the right of the _querula inoffidosi testamenti,_ by which the father was presumed to have died intestate, and his property fell in equal shares to all his children. Thus it was that the right of children in the property of the father was first really recognized at Rome, and the _pars legitima,_ the reserve of which made it impossible for the children to attack the will of the father, came into practice. In the last years of the Republic, this share was at least one-fourth of what the legitimate heir would have received in the absence of a will; under Justinian, it was one-third of the part _ab intestate,_ if this was at least one-fourth of the estate; otherwise, one-half. The father always retained the right to disinherit, for certain reasons, in law. With this diminution of his rights over property went also a lessening of his powers over the bodies of his children. Diocletian forbade the selling of children, Constantine decreed that the father who exposed his new-born child should lose the _patria potestas,_ and Valentinian punished such action with death. Among the ancient Gauls, in spite of the father's power of life and death over his offspring, he could not disinherit them, for the theory of co-proprietorship obtained with these western tribes (215. 16). With the ancient Germans, the father appears to have been rather the protector of his children than their owner or keeper; the child is recognized, somewhat rudely, as a being with some rights of his own. Michelet has aptly observed, as Deneus remarks, that "the Hindus saw in the son the reproduction of the father's soul; the Romans, a servant of the father; the Germans, a child" (215. 17). At first wills were unknown among them, for the system of co-proprietorship,--_hoeredes successoresgue sui cuique liberi et nullum testamentum,_--and the solidarity of the family and all its members, did not feel the need of any. The inroad of Roman ideas, and especially, Deneus thinks, the fervour of converts to Christianity, introduced testamentary legacies.