of Edinhwrgli, Session Ill 
even more primitive rules prevail, and Whitsome in Berwickshire 
and the system of cultivation which this tenure prescribed — by which 
the holder of each lot had to conform to the general directions of 
the community — prevailed widely in the run rig system which was 
so largely the rule a hundred years ago. The parish of Smailholni 
was all cultivated in that manner, and at Lihberton in Lanarkshire, 
and many other places, this system of agriculture, testifying mani- 
festly to the prior existence of some quasi-communal cultivation, 
may he distinctly identified, f 
And there are some other traces of a regulation which reflects 
much light on the real nature of this tenure. At hTewton of Ayr 
there were very special provisions as to the succession to a burgess ; 
and it not unfrequently happened that as females were excluded, 
a lot lapsed by the failure of an heir qualified to take it up ; it 
then reverted to the Community^ which disposed of it to the most 
industrious and fit inhabitant of the place. This, if it could he 
traced in other cases, would be most interesting, for it would con- 
nect this old Saxon tenure of ours very closely with its pristine 
origin in the distant past in the very cradle of mankind — showing 
as it does that the tribe or commune was still the radical owner 
of the soil, and the tenure of individuals only accidental^and con- 
necting this tenure of the Lowland village with those tenures of 
Eastern and some German types where the right of pre-emption is re- 
served to the community or its members, and with that provision we 
are all familiar with, whereby at stated periods of jubilee the tribe re- 
claimed its lost inheritance from private ownership, and the members 
of the tribe started afresh on a fresh lease from their mother tribe. J 
In the rapid and necessarily very incomplete sketch which I have 
thus given of the early tenures in this country there are some 
notable features which challenge observation in these days. The 
first of course is the trite but by no means unchallenged observation 
that the very origin and germ of progress and civilisation is the 
recognition of individual right. Mankind in the mass remained 
inert and indolent in the dim twilight of the earliest days : it was 
man that rose to vigour and action and progress when he asserted his 
* New Statistical Account, vol, ii., suh voce. 
t Statistical Account, vol. iii. p. 217, vol. ii. pp. 98 and 242. 
t New Statistical Account, sub voce. See also Fenton’s Early Hebrew Life, 
pt>. Vl-73. 
