' CONSANGUINITY (Lat. con, together, and sanguis, blood), the relationship which subsists between persons who are of the same blood. It is either is the relationship between ascendants and descendants—or collateral, between persons sprung from a common ancestor. In the direct line, a son is said to stand in the first degree to his father; a grandson, in the second desire to his grandfather; and so on. In the col lateral or oblique line, two different modes of numbering the degrees of consanguinity have been in use, the one that of the civil, the other of the canon law. By the civil law, the degrees are separately numbered downwards to each party from the common ances tor, the common ancestor not being counted. Thus, brothers are in the second degree of consanguinity; uncle and nephew in the third; cousins-german in fourth; and second cousins, or the children of cousins-german, in the sixth degree. By the canon law, consanguinity in the equal oblique line, i.e., where the parties are equally removed from the common ancestor, is computed by the number of degrees between one of them only and the common ancestor; brothers being said to stand in the first, and cousins german in the second, degree to each other. In the unequal oblique line. i.e., which the parties stand in different degrees of relationship to the common ancestor, the degree is determined by the number of steps between the common ancestor and the party further removed from him: thus, uncle and nephew are computed as in the second degree to each other, because the nephew, the further removed of the two, stands in the second degree to the common ancestor, his grandfather. The canon-law computation is more generally used by English lawyers, though statute 22 and 23 Car. I. c. 10 adopts that of the civil law. Scotch lawyers, since the reformation, have generally used the civil law mode of computation. e „ .Affinity is the relationship brought about by marriage between a husband and the blood-relations of his wife, or between a wife and the blood-relations of her husband. The relations of one spouse in any particular degree of consanguinity stand in the same degree of affinity to the other spouse. There is no relationship by affinity between the blood-relations of the husband and those of the wife.
Consanguiuity and affinity have been at different times and in different parts of the world more or less looked on as impediments to marriage between the parties related. Among the ancient Persians and Egyptians, marriages are said to have been sometimes sanctioned between brother and sister, and even father and daughter. The Athenians, while permitting marriages between brothers and sisters uterine, prohibited them between the same relations by the father's side or the full blood. In the book of Genesis, we read
of Abraham marrying his half-sister. The Levitical law prohibited marriage between relations in the direct line, between brother and sister, nephew and aunt, and appar ently by implication, uncle and niece. A son was prohibited from marrying his father's wife.
The Roman law prohibited marriage between ascendants and descendants, a prohibi tion extended to relations by adoption, and even after the dissolution of that tie. In the collateral line, the prohibited degrees included brother and sister (extending to persons so related by adoption where the tie continued to exist), and all cases where one party stood in loco parentis to the other, as uncle and niece. Marriage between cousins-german, at one time prohibited, was declared lawful by Arcadius and Honorins. The degrees prohibited in consanguinity were by Constantine also prohibited in affinity.
By the old canon law and early decretals, marriages were prohibited between persons as far removed as the seventh degree of consanguinity or affinity—i.e., between persons who might, by the civil law computation, be within the twelfth degree to one another. The fourth council of Lateran, 1215 A.D., narrowed the prohibition from the seventh to the fourth degree; i.e., the grandchildren of cousins-german. Affinity was held to be constituted not merely by marriage, but by the spiritual relationship of standing sponsor at baptism, and by illicit intercourse; marriage being prohibited between per sons one of whom had had carnal connection with a relation in the fourth degree of the other. A marriage between persons related in any of these ways was accounted inces tuous, and the children bastards. The pope assumed the right of granting dispensations from impediments to marriage arising from consanguinity and affinity, a power which seems to have been first exercised in the 12th century. In no instances have dispensa tions been granted to relations in the direct line, but one or two dispensations are said toshave been granted between brother and sister; and between uncle and niece, they are still occasionally granted in countries where the canon law continues to be binding. Between remoter relations, they have been common. The extent to which these prohi bitions were carried, and the possibility of their being dispensed with, naturally tended to encourage profligacy and lax ideas of the marriage tie, it being hardly possible to say of any marriage that it might not one day be proved invalid. The council of Trent restricted the impediment of affinity from illicit intercourse to the second degree.