TUANSACTIONS OF SECTIOX ]I. 783 



that tlie word originally denoted the oak, and was transferred to the beech when 

 the chanf^e of vefjetation took place. But this explanation must be rejected, since 

 Ilelbig has proved that the Latin race entered Itiily in tiie stone age, while the 

 change of vegetation in Denmark only took place in the bronze age. The word fiigus, 

 therefore, must have denoted the beech in Latin at a period prior to the change of 

 yegetation to which Professor Max Miiller attributes the alteration in the meaning 

 of the word. 



Geiger and Fick maintain that the change in the meaning of the word was due 

 to the Ureeks having migrated from a land of beeches to a land of oaks, and that 

 they transferred tlu^ name of the one tree to the other, just as the New l^nglandera 

 transferred the names of the robin, the maple, and the hemlock to wholly ditferent 

 species. The line between the ilex, or evergreen oak, which is the charac- 

 teristic tree of Southern Greece, and the beech, which is not found south of 

 Macedonia and Epirus, passes near Dodona, round which are clustered the oldest 

 sacred traditions of the Greeks, and where they made their earliest settlement on 

 their progress towards the south. 



It would, therefore, seem probable that the -wovA. fagus originally denoted the 

 beech and not the oak, also that the Greeks entered ilellas from the north- 

 west. 



The range of the beech is limited. It is a lover of chalk soils, and does not 

 grow east of a line drawn from Kouigsberg to the Crimea. West of this line we 

 must therefore put the cradle of the Latm, Greek, Celtic, and Teutonic peoples, as 

 they had the same name for the tree prior to their linguistic separation. The 

 Lithuanian and Slavonic tongues must have originated east of this line, as 

 their name for the beech is a loan-word from the German. But in earlier times 

 the northern range of the beech was more restricted, and it is believed that in the 

 neolithic age it had not reached Britain, Holland, Denmark, or the Baltic coast. 

 The early home of the beech seems to have been limited to France, Central and 

 Southern Germany, Northern Greece, and Northern Italy. If, as has been con- 

 tended, the cradle of the European Aryans was in Central Asia, where the beech 

 is unknown, it is difficult to explain how the ancestors of Celts, Latins, Greeks, 

 and Teutons, migrating, as Pictet contends, at diilerent times and by separate routes 

 to lands where the beech abounds, should have called it by the same name, modilied 

 in each case by the fundamental phonetic laws of the various languages. 



It is easier to believe that the cradle of the Aryans was, so to sjjeak, astride of 

 the beech line, the ancestors of Celts, Latins, Greeks, and Germans living to the 

 west of it, and those of the Lithuanians and Slaves further to the east. 



Further, since the beech had not extended so far north as Denmark in the 

 neolithic age, and as the pro-ethnic Aryans seem to have been acquainted with this 

 tree, it is more probable that the primitive Aryan race is to be identified with the 

 brachy-cephalic Celto-Italic people of Central Europe, than with the dolicho- 

 cephalic people of the kitchen middens. 



6. The Bight of Property in Trees on another's Land, as an origin of Eights 

 of Property. By Hyde Clarke. 



The author stated that his attention was first called to the subject, as a land-judge 

 or commissioner in Asia Minor, in 1862, in granting compensation for olive-trees 

 belonging to one or more individuals on the lields ot others, and for honey-trees or 

 hoards of wild honey in State or Communal forests. In 1888 the Ilev. Dr. ( 'odring- 

 ton read a paper at the British Association, and afterwards at the Anthropological 

 Institute, which gave information as to the existence of a like system in .Melanesia. 

 The author thereupon proceeded to make further inquiries, and found evidence as 

 to its existence in Borneo, with regard to Tapang or honey-trees, and in Chota 

 Nagpore (and probably elsewhere in Icdia) as to the Mhowa, atree furnishing food, 

 spirit, oil, &c. In China a lessee has the right to bamboo, itc, grown by him. The 

 practice in the Turkish Empire ho found extended into the European provinces, 

 as applied to plum-trees in Bosnia. In Ireland it was recognised in the Brehon 



