A term in law which came to be used in connection with the practice of limiting the inheritance of estates to a certain restricted line of heirs. Attempts of the kind, which arise naturally out of the deeply-seated desire which men have to preserve property—especially landed estates—in their own families, are of ancient date; but the system as understood now, involving the principle of primogeniture, owes its origin to the feudal system. Sometimes the succession was limited to the male issue, but this was by no means an invariable practice; in modern times the system has been, by a succession of Acts of Parliaments (notably the Cairns Act of 1882), greatly modified, and greater powers given to the actual owner of alienating the estates to which he has succeeded, a process which is called "breaking the entail."