JUNE 27, 1884.] 
being in the same general line of investigation, and 
arriving at essentially the same results, deserve care- 
ful study by themselves. . 
The principal object of these two books, so far as 
they are controversial in character, is to disprove the 
accepted theory of village communities. The exist- 
ence of village communities as a feature of serfdom, 
they readily accept; and Mr. Ross even recognizes 
certain quasi communities of freemen, of a compara- 
tively late date, and of subordinate importance: but 
the agricultural community of free peasants, purely 
democratic in its structure, as a regular and necessary 
phase in the history of Germanic society, they either 
deny altogether, or accept as a merely transient and 
unimportant phenomenon. 
It may be noted here, that neither of these treatises 
aims to cover the entire ground of the inquiry. Mr. 
Seebohm’s investigations are, for the most part, con- 
fined to the English people, — an intruding people, 
settled by conquest upon a soil to which they were 
foreign. Here he appears to have completely estab- 
lished his thesis by a series of inductions of remark- 
able fulness and cogency, and to have shown that the 
evidence before us does not warrant us in going back 
of the servile community which we know to have ex- 
isted in the middle ages. But when he passes from 
England to the original home of the English, he con- 
tents himself with the discussion of two or three 
points, of considerable interest and importance, it is 
true, but which do not go to the bottom of the mat- 
ter. Mr. Ross pursues his inquiries by a precisely 
opposite method. Instead of working back inductive- 
ly from the present to the past, he begins with the first 
settlement of the Germans in their permanent homes, 
and traces their landed institutions step by step down 
to fully historicaltimes. Likeall deductive processes, 
his reasoning depends for its force upon our acceptance 
of the proposition with which he starts. 
This proposition is (p. 1), that ‘‘ the freemen settled 
neither in villages nor in towns, but apart from one 
another, in isolated farmsteads.’’ Of the evidence 
for this proposition, derived from chap. xvi. of the 
Germania of Tacitus, I spoke some months ago (see 
Science, No. 45), in a review of Mr. Ross’s book. My 
object now is not to repeat what I said then, or to 
examine the proposition itself, but to bring it into 
relation with other connected branches of inquiry. 
Mr. Ross has given us an invaluable treatise upon 
early German land-holding; but landed institutions 
are only one of a group of institutions, and, however 
fundamental their importance, they cannot be fully 
understood, except in connection with the social or- 
ganization and the political institutions of the people 
in question. Moreover, however fundamental the 
landed institutions are at the stage of civilization in 
which the Germans were at the time of the migra- 
tions, in the earlier stages of society they are of only 
secondary importance, and, indeed, only come into 
existence at a relatively late epoch in the life of any 
community. 
Primitive communities stand in no relation to the 
land except that of occupation. Land is to them a 
free gift of nature, just like air; and individual own- 
SCIENCE. 
7187 
ership, or even permanent individual occupation, is in- 
conceivable tothem. For primitive communities, the 
most fundamental consideration is that of the social 
organization, — the structure of society: the relation 
to the land does not come into consideration until the 
people has passed through savage life and the lower 
stages of barbarism, and has settled down to perma- 
nent occupation and systematic agriculture. Then, 
upon the passage from the personal to the territorial 
basis of organization, the land becomes the subject of 
the first consequence. It is readily seen, therefore, 
that Mr. Ross, starting with individual property in 
land, leaves out of sight —as he has a right to do — 
all the earlier phases of landed relations, as well as 
the entire question of social structure. We cannot, 
however, fully understand the landed institutions 
themselves, or fully appreciate the bearing of Mr. 
Ross’s researches, without bringing them into rela- 
tion with these cognate branches of inquiry. 
It will be well to diverge here for a moment to Sir 
Henry Maine’s book, which raises a question similar 
to that under consideration. In chap. vii., ‘ Theories 
of primitive society,’ he pronounces in favor of the 
‘patriarchal theory of society,’ — that is, ‘* the theory 
of its origin in separate families, held together by the 
authority and protection of the eldest valid male as- 
cendant,’’ — against the view presented by Morgan 
and McLennan, of its origin in the horde. That this 
was the history of society as we are in condition to 
trace it, especially in the Indo-European family of 
nations, there is no doubt; but the patriarchal family, 
like individual ownership of land, requires something 
back of it to account for its origin. It is not primi- 
tive, but must itself be the outcome of ages of gradual 
advancement. 
The theory of the patriarchal family, as defined 
by Sir Henry Maine, lends itself readily to Mr. Ross’s 
theory of landed relations. ‘The German warrior, 
upon the settlement of his tribe in a new region, 
may be supposed to have taken a tract of land, and 
settled upon it with his sons and daughters, his slaves 
and serfs. From this beginning, the sketch of landed 
relations presented by Mr. Ross possesses unity and 
consistency. To accept it in full, however, as an 
exhaustive theory of the subject, we must not only 
agree to the interpretation of Tacitus, by which he 
establishes his premise, but must also bring his the- 
oryinto harmony with what we know of the primi- 
tive social organization of the Germans. 
It is generally agreed that the Germans, in the time 
of Caesar, — and these remarks apply also, in the 
main, to the time of Tacitus, a hundred and fifty years 
later, — were in what is sometimes called the semi- 
nomadic stage, but what we may, perhaps, better de- 
scribe as the end of a series of migrations. There is 
good evidence that the intruding Germans had dis- 
placed Celts in some parts of Germany at a relatively 
recent date; and.the great invasion of the Teutones 
and Cimbri at just the time of Caesar’s birth, was, no 
doubt, apart of this general migration. This erratic 
movement of the Cimbri and Teutones was checked 
by the Romans with considerable difficulty; but an 
effective barrier was placed against the slow west- 
