There is another kind of universal succession which owes its introduction neither to the statute of the Twelve Tables nor to the praetor's Edict, but to the law which is based upon custom and consent.

1 When an independent person gives himself in adrogation, all his property, corporeal and incorporeal, and all debts due to him formerly passed in full ownership to the adrogator, except such rights as are extinguished by loss of status, for instance, bounden services of freedmen and rights of agnation. Use and usufruct, though formerly enumerated among such rights, have now been saved by our constitution from extinction by the least loss of status.

2 But we have now confined acquisition by adrogation within the same limits as acquisition through their children by natural parents; that is to say, adoptive as well as natural parents acquire no greater right in property which comes to children in their power from any extraneous source than a mere usufruct; the ownership is vested in the children themselves. But if a son who has been adrogated dies in his adoptive family, the whole of his property vests in the adrogator, failing those persons who, under our constitution, are preferred to the father in succession to property which is not acquired immediately from him.

3 Conversely, the adrogator is not, by strict law, suable for the debts of his adoptive son, but an action may be brought against him as his representative; and if he declines to defend the latter, the creditors are allowed, by an order of the magistrates having jurisdiction in such cases, to take possession of the property of which the usufruct as well as the ownership would have belonged to the son, had he not subjected himself to the power of another, and to dispose of it in the mode prescribed by law.