of Edinburgh, Session 1882-83. 
101 
nity of wives unquestionably characterised that system out of which 
the Gaelic and the Saxon alike proceeded, and contemporaneous 
therewith was the community of land which was unquestionably 
the first form of tenure, if that can be called tenure which nobody 
held. The earliest traces that exist of social life in the past, and 
all the analogies that scientific investigation has discovered in the 
more modern types of archaic society which survive, point irresistibly 
to the conclusion that while individual rights existed and were 
recognised in personal property, the soil was regarded and treated as 
the common property of the tribe ; and naturally so, while as yet 
man sought his scanty subsistence in the 'chase and in the waters, 
and the untamed earth yielded to him in common with the beasts 
he hunted only the spontaneous tribute of its wild berries and 
roots. While it would be affectation to assert anything definite 
of a state of society which has left behind it so few traces, and 
these necessarily so indefinite, still one can discern the first germ of 
right and title in land in the right which the tribe itself naturally 
came to assert as against other tribes in the region within which it 
first began to settle ; the choice corries of the deer, the favourite 
pools of the salmon, above all, the dwellings of their dead, would 
begin to possess an individual value to that tribe which first began to 
haunt these localities, and other tribes would be taught to reverence 
what the one tribe had begun to value; and this was probably the 
dawn of land right and land tenure. 
The tribe first emerges with us from the darkness of barbarism 
at that epoch of its existence when restrained and coerced by the 
growth of population the nomadic habits of the race began to give 
place to pastoral life, and man began to assert his supremacy over 
the brute creation otherwise than by hunting them. When first the 
tribe or its individual components began to feed cattle the necessity 
of feeding ground made itself felt, and it is just at that point that 
economic history really begins; there is no trace of which I am 
aware of a common estate in cattle. On the contrary everything 
tends to the conclusion that among the early inhabitants of this land 
cattle was the form of property over which the individual rights of 
man was first asserted, and cattle became the measure in and by 
which other rights and property were appreciated. Cattle was the 
money ■ of the ancient people with whom we are now dealing, and 
