192 JAMES NEIL, M.A., 
It was a holding that could be conveyed to others, and the lands 
thus held could apparently be temporarily let to yearly tenants. 
All those allusions, that appear to us to be to individual holdings 
in severalty, are really to common rights enjoyed together with 
fellow commouers—rights of sowing a portion of the open field— 
not of permanently possessing any part of it. The: subject must 
be so new to many that no wonder doubts arise when it is first put 
plainly. Give me one single instance of holding broad acres 
in severalty in all the pages of the Bible! I think the view I 
take of the ancient character of the tenure of land as now found 
in Palestine is conclusively confirmed by the remark of Sir Henry 
Sumner Maine, one of our greatest jurists learned in Indian law, 
that all “ the most distinguished public servants” in India, in the 
last century held “that no ownership of Indian land was dis- 
coverable except that of the village-communities subject to the 
dominion of the State ”—(Village-Communities in the Hast and 
West, pp. 61, 62.) Oriental monarchs, no matter how powerful, 
did not interfere with their people’s tenure of land, so long as 
they paid their taxes and provided men for the army; and the 
Mohammedans, like the rulers who preceded them, have left the 
villages to themselves, and thus, thank God, have preserved for 
us a living commentary on the Book. 
The meeting was then adjourned. 
REMARKS ON THE FOREGOING PAPER. 
A few points strike me in connection with the Rey. J. Neil’s 
valuable paper on ‘‘ Ancient Land Tenure, as Preserved by the 
Villagers (Fellahheen) of Palestine.” 
I would rather render the term musha’a by undistributed than 
by ‘‘common,” though prgcucally, “ undistributed” land is farmed 
by the fellahheen as “common” land. 
It must be remembered that not all, but (as Mr. Neil obser ves) 
only a large part of arable land is undistributed and allotted 
annually. In my time, this was chiefly the case on the great corn 
tracts, e.g., the Sharon and Philistine plains. 
If WW, sddeh, be derived, as it appears to be, from PRY, sadad, 
“to break up clods with plough or harrow” (as in Isaiah xxviii, 24 ; 
Hosea x, 11), we may well render it as arable grain pase as dis. 
tinguished from fruit or garden land. 
