So, too, in all other questions which concerned the maintenance of the family, and especially in regard to the devolution of property. I am here only illustrating the way in which the pontifical college acquired their paramount influence by having a quantity of new and difficult work forced upon them, and it is not part of my plan to explain the early history of adoptions and wills; but I may give a single concrete illustration for the benefit of those who are not versed in Roman law. It must constantly have happened, in that disturbed period which brought the kingship to an end, that by death or capture in war a family was left without male heirs. Daughters could not take their place, because the _sacra_ of a family could not be maintained by daughters, who would, in the natural order of things, be sooner or later married and so become members of other families. Hence the expedient was adopted of making a _filius familias_ of another family a member of your own; and this, like marriage, involved a straining of the relations between the human and divine members of your family, and was thus a matter for the religious authorities to contrive in such a manner as to preserve the _pax_ between them. The difficulty was overcome by the practical wisdom of the pontifical college, which held a solemn inquiry into the case before submitting it to the people in specially summoned assembly (_comitia calata_);[565] and thus the new _filius familias_ was enabled not only to renounce his own _sacra_ (_detestatio sacrorum_), but to pass into the guardianship of another set of _sacra_, without incurring the anger of the _numina_ concerned with the welfare of either.