DE DONIS CONDITIONALIBUS

de donis conditionalibus, a chapter of the statute of westminster the second (1285) which originated the law of entail. strictly speaking, a form of entail was known before the norman feudal law had been domesticated in england. the common form was a grant "to the feoffee and the heirs of his body," by which limitation it was sought to prevent alienation from the lineage of the first purchaser. these grants were also known as _feuda conditionata_, because if the donee had no heirs of his body the estate reverted to the donor. this right of reversion was evaded by the interpretation that such a gift was a conditional fee, which enabled the donee, if he had an heir of the body born alive, to alienate the land, and consequently disinherit the issue and defeat the right of the donor. to remedy this the statute _de donis conditionalibus_ was passed, which enacted that, in grants to a man and the heirs of his body, the will of the donor according to the form in the deed of gift manifestly expressed, should be from thenceforth observed; so that they to whom the land was given under such condition, should have no power to alienate the land so given, but that it should remain unto the issue of those to whom it was given after their death, or unto the giver or his heirs, if issue fail. since the passing of the statute an estate given to a man and the heirs of his body has been known as an estate tail, or an estate in fee tail (_feudum talliatum_), the word tail being derived from the french _tailler_, to cut, the inheritance being by the statute cut down and confined to the heirs of the body. the operation of the statute soon produced innumerable evils: "children, it is said, grew disobedient when they knew they could not be set aside; farmers were deprived of their leases; creditors were defrauded of their debts; innumerable latent entails were produced to deprive purchasers of the land they had fairly bought; treasons also were encouraged, as estates tail were not liable to forfeiture longer than for the tenant's life" (williams, _real property_). accordingly, the power of alienation was reintroduced by the judges in taltarum's case (_year book_, 12 edward iv., 1472) by means of a fictitious suit or recovery which had originally been devised by the regular clergy for evading the statutes of mortmain. this was abolished by an act passed in 1833. (see fine.) deduction (from lat. _deducere_, to take or lead from or out of, derive), a term used in common parlance for the process of taking away from, or subtracting (as in mathematics), and specially for the argumentative process of arriving at a conclusion from evidence, i.e. for any kind of inference.[1] in this sense it includes both arguments from particular facts and those from general laws to particular cases. in logic it is generally used in contradiction to "induction" for a kind of mediate inference, in which a conclusion (often itself called the deduction) is regarded as following necessarily under certain fixed laws from premises. this, the most common, form of deduction is the syllogism (q.v.; see also logic), which consists in taking a general principle and deriving from it facts which are necessarily involved in it. this use of deduction is of comparatively modern origin; it was originally used as the equivalent of aristotle's [greek: apagoge] (see _prior analytics_, b xxv.). the modern use of deduction is practically identical with the aristotelian [greek: syllogismos]. footnote: [1] two forms of the verb are used, "deduce" and "deduct"; originally synonymous, they are now distinguished, "deduce" being confined to arguments, "deduct" to quantities.