I.D.Dua, J.

(1) THIS is plaintiffs appeal with certificate from the judgment and decree, dated 4/08/1958, of the High court of Judicature at Madras allowing the appeal of defendant No. 1 (in the trial court) from the judgment and decree, dated 27/02/1954, passed in the plaintiffs suit for partition of family property and for dissolution of family partnenhip and accounts by the Additional Sobordinate Judge, Vellore.

(2) THE suit was instituted in March, 1934. It is unnecessary to refer to the chequered career of the suit. Suffice it to say that the trial court passed the preliminary decree in December, 1939. This decree directed, inter alia, that the accounts be taken of the assets and liabilities of the business of Dada Mian & Sons carred on by the plaintiff and the defendants from November, 1925 till the date of the suit, i. e. 27/03/1934. Broadly, the form of this order had in fact been settled with consent of the parties before the appellate court and the case had been remanded to the trial court for partition and division of the property and for delivery of possession. The trial court, however, made a detailed decree specifying the shares of the parties to which it is unnecessary to refer for the purposes of the present appeal.

(3) DEFENDANT No. 1 took the matter on appeal to the Madras High Court. That appeal was disposed of in December, 1942. The High court disagreed with the trial court on certain matters. Apart from the conclusions and directions given by the High court with respect to the other properties with which we are not concerned in this appeal, the High court said:

"............IT will also follow that in calculating the sums due to the various partners in Exhibit II, which sums were all carried forward to the new partnership with the exception of what was taken away by D. W. 1, Rs. 16,350.00 will have to be excluded. The sums then ascertained as due to the various partners will be deemed to be the capital contributed by them in the new partnership of 1925............

......... ...We do not however find any reason for thinking that the entitle "Dadamian & Sons" in other words the family was the ejaman in the new partnership. The word "ejaman" was prefixed only to Dadamian, whose name still found a place in the new accounts, even though be was dead and to Abdul Ali, who had ceased to be a partner. Moreover, we think that a ejaman partnership is inconsistent with the terms of the contract entered into by the parties in Exhibit III. If we read Exhibit III with Exhibit II and examine the accounts it becomes clear that the various parties to Exhibit III contracted to conduct a new business, sharing as partners in the ordinary way with certain defined shares."

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"THE learned Subordinate Judge has left open the question as to what were the assets of the business subsequent to 1925; and we feel that as the suit proceeded in the lower court on the basis that the details as to the division of the property and the ascertainment of the rights in individual items acquired after 1925 should be left to the final decree stage, it is desirable that the accounts already filed should be looked into and other evidence permitted to show from what sourcea this property was acquired. The accounts may show that the purchase price of a particular item of property has been debited to a particular partner. If so, then the property would probably be his. It might appear that property as acquired out of money belonging to Dadamian, in which case it would be the property of the family. It might, alternatively have been acquired entirely out of profits, in which case it would belong to all the partners. Another possibility is that it was acquired out of money belonging partly to Dadamians family and partly to the partners as such, in which case it would have to be divided amongst the heirs of Dadamian and the partners in proportion to the amounts taken from the two source. We therefore expr