places her girdle on the body of the deceased; note is taken of it, and the time awaited. If the waiting is vain, at the end of eleven months the widow is visited and examined by matrons; and if nevertheless the professed pregnancy has no result, the child who refuses to be born is called "asleep" for an indefinite time. Henceforth the widow is free, and if she ends by becoming a mother, her child, awaited so long, is reputed to be the son of the husband dead years before, and inherits from him.[1]
This singular prejudice is common to the Kabyles and to the Arabs. A number of Mussulman legists have vainly tried to overcome it. All that they have been able to do is to limit to four or five years, generally to four, the duration of this pretended "sleep" of the fœtus.[2]
The widow has not been more worthily treated at the origin of Greco-Roman civilisation than in the other barbarous civilisations. It would be strange if it were so. We have seen that at Athens the woman, even when married, was part of the paternal patrimony; that the dying husband could leave her by will to a friend, with his goods, and by the same title; that at Rome the wife was bought and subjected to the terrible right of the marital manus.
For a long time at Rome, as in China at the present day, the widows who did not marry were particularly honoured The widower married again immediately after his wife's death; widows, on the contrary, were in any case forbidden to marry before a delay of six months, afterwards extended to twelve months, and that under pain of infamy for the father who had made the marriage, for the husband who had taken the widow, and later for the re-married woman also, when infamy also applied to women. By degrees Roman customs and laws improved on this point as on others. The Leges Julia and Papia Poppœa encouraged second marriages, in opposition to the ancient prejudice; the Institutes ordained that when the widow was poor and without dowry, she could inherit from her husband one-fourth if there were three children, and a full masculine share if there were none.[3] But the triumph of Christianity
