ADOPTION by Testament, that performed by appointing a person heir by will, on condition of his assuming the name, arms, &c. of the adopter; of which kind we meet with several instances in the Roman history. Among the Turks, the ceremony of adoption is performed by obliging the person adopted to pass through the shirt of the adopter. Hence, among that people, to adopt is expressed by the phrase, to draw another through my shirt. It is said that something like this has also been observed among the Hebrews, where the prophet Elijah adopted Elisha for his son and successor, and communicated to him the gift of prophecy, by letting fall his cloak or mantle on him. But adoption, properly so called, does not appear to have been practised among the ancient Jews. Moses says nothing of it in his laws; and Jacob's adoption of his two grandsons, Ephraim and Manasseh, is not so properly an adoption as a kind of substitution, whereby those two sons of Joseph were allotted an equal portion in Israel with his own sons.