ACCESSION (Lat. ad, to + eedere, to go, move). In the law of property, a mode of acquiring title to land or goods by their annex• ation to the real or personal property of another, whereby the tiling annexed loses its separate identity. It occurs where land is gradually increased by accretion (q.v.) or allarion where a tenant or stranger ereets a building or attaches a fixture (q.v.) to land, and where a chattel belonging to one is improved by the addition of materials or labor of another, as in the repair of a wagon by adding a wheel or by painting it, or in the of leather into shoes. The legal effect of the annexation is to transfer the title of the thing annexed to the owner of the property so improved or increased, the identity of the former having been merged in the latter: the wheel, the paint, and the labor, in the examples given above, having dis appeared as separate articles and being now inseparable parts of the wagon and the leather. The rule governing accessions is that the own ership of the principal thing carries with it that of the inferior thing. lint, as the question of
superiority or inferiority is not always one of price or value, the rule is sometimes difficult of application. Thus, additions and improvements to land, however extensive and valuable they may be. always accrue to the owner of the soil, and a chattel may be doubled or trebled in value by the expenditure of skill and labor without changing its ownership. lint where the identity of a chattel is eompletelY changed by the labor expended upon it, as by the conversion of malt into Leer, or where it is enormously increased in value, as by the manufacture of pig iron into watch-springs, the product belongs to the person whose money and labor have effected the trans formation. See the article on CONFUSION; and consult Schouler, Treatise on the Law of Personal Property (Boston, 1896).