in the Civil Law, is particularly applied to a child issued from an adulterous amour or commerce. Adulterine children are more odious than the illegitimate offspring of single persons. The Roman law even refuses them the title of natural children, as if nature disowned them. Adulterine children are not easily dispensed with for admission to orders. Those are not deemed adulterine who are begotten of a woman openly married, through ignorance of a former wife being alive. By a decree of the parliament of Paris, adulterine children are declared not legitimated by the subsequent marriage of the parties, even though a papal dispensation be had for such marriage, wherein is a clause of legitimation.

ADULTERINE Marriages, in St Augustine's sense, denote second marriages contracted after a divorce.