ANTHROPOLOGY. 
121 
and its merits and defects balanced. On the one hand it assures a main¬ 
tenance for all, while on the other it limits the population of a district, 
the more so from the obstinate resistance which the council of ff old men ” 
who manage a Tillage always oppose to any improved method of tillage. 
Not less perfectly do the tenures existing in many countries show the 
various stages of landholding which arise out of military conquest. The 
absolute ownership of all the land by a barbaric chief or king, which 
may be seen in such a country as Dahome, whose subjects hold their 
lands on royal sufferance, is an extreme case. In the East, feudal tenures 
of land granted for military service still have much the same results as 
in mediaeval Europe. 
At low levels of civilisation the first dawning of criminal law may be 
seen in the rule of vengeance or retaliation. The person aggrieved, or his 
kinsfolk if he has been killed, are at once judges and executioners, and the 
vengeance they inflict stands in some reasonable relation to the offence 
committed. Not only is such vengeance the great means of keeping order 
among such rude tribes as the Australians, but even among half-civilised 
nations like Abyssinians and Afghans the primitive law may still be 
studied in force, carried out in strict legal order as a lex talionis, not 
degraded to mere illegal survival in outlying districts like the a vendetta ” 
of modem Europe, carried on even now, in spite of criminal jurisprudence, 
which for ages has striven to transfer punishment from private hands to 
the State. Whether among savages, barbarians, or the lower civilised 
nations, the traveller will find everywhere matter of interesting observa¬ 
tion in the law and its administration. The law may be still in the state 
of unwritten custom, and the senate or council of old men may be the 
judges, or the power at once of lawgiver and judge may have passed into 
the hands of the chief, who, as among the modern Kafirs, may make a 
handsome revenue by the cattle given him as fees by both sides, a fact 
interesting as illustrating the times when an European judge took gifts as 
a matter of course. Among the nations at higher levels of culture in the 
East, for instance, most of the stages may still be seen through which the 
administration of law, criminal and civil, was given over to a trained 
legal class. One important stage in history is marked by religion taking 
to itself legal control over the conduct of a nation. The working of 
this is seen among Oriental nations, whether Mohammedan, Brahman, 
or Buddhist, whose codes of law are of an ecclesiastical tyoe, and the 
