PRIMOGENITURE AND ULTIMOGENITURE

preference in inheritance that is given by law, custom, or usage to the eldest son and his issue (primogeniture) or to the youngest son (ultimogeniture). In exceptional cases, primogeniture may prescribe such preferential inheritance to the line of the eldest daughter. The motivation for such a practice has usually been to keep the estate of the deceased, or some part of it, whole and intact. In the West, laws forbidding the partitioning of land and decreeing its devolution upon the youngest or eldest son served as a means of preserving not only the size of the real estate so affected but also the power and prestige of the aristocracy, which traditionally rested on land ownership. Strict primogeniture among nonliterate peoples is rare; the eldest son usually assumes the responsibility of trusteeship of the property and of adjudicating attendant disputes. Sometimes the practice, in modified form, governs succession to power and office rather than to possessions. Among some agricultural peoples of increasing population and limited land, however, one of the two practices as employed in the West prevents the partitioning of an already scarce commodity. Some observers have reasoned that the designation of a sole heir generates territorial expansion by forcing the unwilled sons to fend for themselves: among the Maori and some peoples of Polynesia, this meant trekking off to colonize a new, uninhabited area. Primogeniture probably implies, as a choice over ultimogeniture, the importance of hierarchical considerations by maintaining respect for the most advanced in age. If, on the other hand, ultimogeniture (also called junior right) is the method of maintaining the integrity of the inheritance, the elder brothers may be compensated with privileges of authority, travel, and some form of pecuniary or material advantage; and it may be reasoned that the youngest son, having stayed the longest in the house of his father, having more years to live, and being the least likely to have established himself in the world, should be the one to whom the land falls.