OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 313 



and twelve shares of arable land, each son took three laborers and 

 three shares of the land. If the father left sixty animals and sixty 

 shares of the pasture land, each son took fifteen animals and fifteen 

 shares of the pasture, — that is to say, pasture for fifteen animals. 

 With the consent and approval of his sons, the deceased might, during 

 bis lifetime, have alienated some of his laborers and shares of arable 

 land, and some of his animals and shares of pasture land. The early 

 records are full of illustrations and proofs for these statements. As I 

 have given numerous extracts and references in my book, I will not 

 repeat them here. The evidence of the early records leads us to this 

 conclusion : that individual proprietorship of land was among the early 

 Germans, in almost all cases, antecedent to the division of the land into 

 permanent severalties; that the earliest form of proprietorship was a 

 proprietorship of what may be called capitalized shares. 



As time went on, the undivided shares of arable land were, first here 

 and there, then almost everywhere, converted into severalties. Then 

 we have private holdings instead of undivided ones, private property 

 instead of undivided property. 



The disposition of these severalty holdings of arable land depended 

 mainly upon the configuration and character of the soil. In moun- 

 tainous, hilly, and especially in rocky countries, where the good arable 

 land lay scattered here and there in small tracts, it was necessary for 

 the proprietors — for their laborers at any rate — to distribute them- 

 selves in isolated farmsteads in the neighborhood of the isolated fields 

 which they were to cultivate. Under such conditions, we have what 

 the German writers call the Elnzelhof-system. In valleys and in flat 

 regions generally, where the arable land lies in large tracts, it was 

 customary to have the dwelling-places — at least those of the laborers 

 who were to cultivate the land — close together in villages, and the 

 lots of arable land in long strips side by side, or radiating from a com- 

 mon centre. Vestiges of this arrangement of the lots may still be 

 observed in certain places. The arrangement is a very convenient and 

 satisfactory one, except in cases where the strips of arable land are 

 not equally fertile and productive. It was very important, in the times 

 of which we are writing, that the arable lots should be equally pro- 

 ductive, because each one of the laborers wlio cultivated the lots paid 

 a certain amount of produce to his master, and the amount was fixed 

 by tradition or local custom, without regard to the land from which 

 the pi'oduce was to be obtained. It was necessary therefore, in jus- 

 tice, that the lots of land should be, as far as possible, equally pro- 

 ductive. From the proprietor's point of view, also, it was important 



