E.— GEOGRAPHY 1 1 1 



permanent : either a rotation in the use of lands is established and the 

 households have their strips in each of the village lands, or a portion of 

 the village land specially enriched by manure from stock folded on it may 

 be cultivated nearly every year, and some portion of an ' outfield ' may be 

 used as may be required or may be possible. There seems to have been, 

 with the growth of this phase, an increase of the social or conjoint activi- 

 ties of the group. In many parts of Europe harvesting had to be com- 

 pleted by a certain day, on which a bell was rung and the fences around the 

 crops removed to allow the cattle to feed in the stubble fields and give 

 them manure. This is but one of scores of activities regulated for the 

 village by custom and continuing through centuries, a scheme of life 

 which maintained and developed the idea of a trust handed along the 

 generations. Communal agriculture has largely passed away in Europe, 

 but it is the basis on which later systems have been built, and its idea of 

 the soil as a trust underlies much that is still important. It is important 

 perhaps most of all because of a long continuity of inheritance, but it is 

 in danger from the fact that our industrial culture is so drastically uncon- 

 formable above these deeper layers, and has so diverged from the idea of 

 a society living in close relation with a particular piece of the earth. The 

 danger of unconformable superposition of cultures, when very extreme, 

 is illustrated by the fate of the pre-Columbian life of America, and the 

 peoples concerned, in the last few centuries. 



In the regions with irrigation or plough agriculture or both, the differ- 

 entiation of crafts went much farther than among societies with hoe 

 cultivation. Exchange developed more considerably and there are towns 

 or cities, fundamentally centres of exchange and of handicraft, and often 

 of a priesthood and government. Cities are not found in intertropical 

 Africa save in a few spots where they are due to intrusive influences of 

 fairly recent date. The typical social unit in Africa is thus the village or 

 the little group of villages ; in Europe and Asia the village may be the 

 fundamental unit among settled peoples, but it also forms part of a larger 

 unit made up of a town and a number of villages. 



The nomadic or semi-nomadic societies of intertropical Africa live 

 on their cattle, and by hunting and collecting, as well as by raiding those 

 who are more sedentary and less ready for war. The nomadic and semi- 

 nomadic societies of Europe, Asia and northern Africa have in many cases 

 the important auxiliary activity of trade, and use their beasts as carriers. 

 Moreover, they have typically developed or contributed to the develop- 

 ment of stations, which have in many cases become centres of trade and 

 religion, i.e. sacred cities, near the bounds of the waste or in oases. The 

 names of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Damascus, Ur of the Chaldees, 

 Babylon itself, Khiva, Bukhara, Merv, Samarcand, Lhasa and many another 

 crowd on one's memory. In China, India and the Fertile Crescent the 

 semi-nomad, especially after he acquired the use of the horse, found it 

 possible to dominate the cultivator, and seems often to have contributed 

 an elaboration of organisation to the group of social units, villages and their 

 focal towns become grouped into larger entities. In Africa, too, pastoral 

 groups have repeatedly conquered cultivators and, in such cases as that 

 of the Baganda, have attempted a considerable amount of organisation 



