In Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co. (1950) 339 U.S. 306, the United States Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a statute that authorized corporate trustees to combine small individual trusts into a common trust fund. The Mullane court considered whether notice by publication in a newspaper of the settlement of the common trust fund was a sufficient form of notice to the beneficiaries. (Id. at pp. 307-308.) The court concluded that newspaper publication was constitutionally sufficient as to those "beneficiaries . . . whose interests or whereabouts could not with due diligence be ascertained. . . ." (id. at p. 317), reasoning: "This Court has not hesitated to approve of resort to publication as a customary substitute . . . where it is not reasonably possible or practicable to give more adequate warning. Thus it has been recognized that, in the case of persons missing or unknown, employment of an indirect and even a probably futile means of notification is all that the situation permits and creates no constitutional bar to a final decree foreclosing their rights. " (Ibid.) In Mullane, the Supreme Court expressly stated that the case before it did not involve abandoned property, and indicated that a state need not provide the same degree of notice before taking abandoned property as when taking claimed property, "A state may indulge the assumption that one who has left tangible property in the state either has abandoned it, in which case proceedings against it deprive him of nothing , or that he has left some caretaker under a duty to let him know that it is being jeopardized. . . . 'It is the part of common prudence for all those who have any interest in (a thing), to guard that interest by persons who are in a situation to protect it.'" (Mullane, supra, 339 U.S. at p. 316.)