Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 2.djvu/433

 426 FEDERAL REPORTER. �Horner v. Horner, 1 Hagg. Cons. 353 ; Queen y. Brîghton, 1 £11. Bl. & Son, 447; Regina v. Brighton, 1 Best & Smith, 447; People V. Jeuners, 5 Mich. 318; 1 Bishop's Mar. & Divorce, § 317. Marriages between persons in the direct lineal line of consanguinity, and between brothers and sisters in the col- lateral line, are incestuous and void as against the law of nature. Sutten v. Warren, 10 Met. 451; Hiram v. Pierce, 45 Maine, 367; Wightman v. Wightman, 4 John. Ch. 343. In the last-cited case Chancelier Kent expreased the opinion that, in the absence of legislation, it could not be main- tained that marriages between persons of a remote degree of consanguinity can be declared void. �A marriage between nephew and aunt was prohibited by the canon law of England, and the prohibition was incorpo- rated into various statutes of Henry VIII. , and the distinction between void and voidable marriages has become crystallized into the later law of England. Such marriages, while not void, were voidable by the sentence of the ecclesiastical courts pronounced during the life-time of both parties. �Whether this distinction has ever obtained in our own coun- try is an open question, but that it has never obtained in this Btate is authoritatively settled. �The commentators recognize it as a part of the body of law brought to the colonies by our ancestors and adopted by us; but in Burtis v, Burtis, 1 Hopk. 557, the question was exam- ined by the chancellor, in the light of the provincial history of New York, and he concluded that the law of England con- ceming divorces and matrimonial causes was never adopted in the colony of New York, in fact or practice, and was never the law of the colony; and that the statutes of the state were clearly original regulations, intended to authorize divorces in cases in which no divorce could before be obtained, and he says "to consider them as an adoption of the English law of divorces would be a violent perversion of the language and intention of the legislature." This case is foUowed by Palmer V. Palmer, 1 Paige, 276, to the effect that the court of chan- cery had no power to decree a dissolution of the marriage «ontract except in the special cases provided for by statute, ����