PROPERTY. 539 



claims are in considerable degrees over-ridden or imperfectly 

 maintained. We read of the Chippewayans that &quot;Indian 

 law requires the successful hunter to share the spoils of the 

 chase with all present ;&quot; and Hillhouse says of the Arawaks 

 that though individual property is &quot; distinctly marked 

 amongst them,&quot; &quot;yet they are perpetually borrowing and 

 lending, without the least care about payment.&quot; But such 

 instances merely imply that private ownership is at first ill- 

 defined, as we might expect, a priori, that it would be. 



Evidently the thoughts and feelings which accompany the 

 act of taking possession, as when an animal clutches its prey, 

 and which at a higher stage of intelligence go along with the 

 grasping of any article indirectly conducing to gratification, 

 are the thoughts and feelings to which the theory of property 

 does but give a precise shape. Evidently the use in legal 

 documents of such expressions as &quot; to have and to hold,&quot; and 

 to be &quot;seized&quot; of a thing, as well as the survival up to 

 comparatively late times of ceremonies in which a portion 

 (rock or soil) of an estate bought, representing the whole, 

 actually passed from hand to hand, point back to tins 

 primitive physical basis of ownership. Evidently the de 

 veloped doctrine of property, accompanying a social state in 

 which men s acts have to be mutually restrained, is a 

 doctrine which on the one hand asserts the freedom to take 

 and to keep within specified limits, and denies it beyond 

 those limits gives positiveness to the claim while restricting 

 it. And evidently the increasing definiteness thus given to 

 rights of individual possession, may be expected to show itself 

 first where definition is relatively easy and afterwards where 

 it is less easy. This we shall find that it does. 



537. While in early stages it is difficult, not to say impos 

 sible, to establish and mark off individual claims to parts of 

 the area wandered over in search of food, it is not difficult to 

 mark off the claims to movable things and to habitations ; 

 and these claims we find habitually recognized. The follow- 



