Viscount Haldane:-

This is an appeal from a decree, made on the 8th April, 1920, of the High Court at Bombay, in its appellate capacity, affirming with variations a decree, dated the 14th March, 1919, of Macleod, J., the Judge of first ins tance. The questions decided arose in a suit for the construction and administration of the trusts of the will of the late Naoroji Jehangir Gamadia, who left a large estate, mainly in Bombay.

The chief questions which their Lord ships have to decide are whether certain provisions made by the will for persons other than the testator's sons and daugh ters, relating to residential property, are valid and whether other and more gene ral dispositions also made by the will can be treated as effective.

The Courts below have decided that all the dispositions referred to, with certain limited exceptions, are invalid, and that consequently the property is now present ly divisible between the testator's sons equally under a gift of the residuary estate but subject for a limited period to a right of maintenance out of the income of such persons as during that period may be entitled to the benefit of such of the excepted dispositions of residential pro perty as