never been cleared, or which, having been cleared,
has been abandoned and reverted, must often be in a very large number
of persons without defined rights. In fact, so far as bush land is
concerned, one only has to remember that on the death of an owner it
passes into joint ownership of children--that on the deaths of these
children fresh groups of persons come into the joint ownership--that
this may go on indefinitely, generation after generation--that bush,
having once got into the ownership of many people, is hardly likely
to again fall by descents into a single ownership--that indeed the
tendency must be for the number of owners of any one portion of bush
steadily to increase--and finally that there is no way by which the
extensively divided ownership can be terminated by either partition
or alienation--and one then realises the extraordinary complications
of family ownership of bush land which must commonly exist.

As regards both movable effects and gardens and bush land there must
be endless occasions for dispute. How are the movable things to be
divided among the inheritors, and, in particular, who is to take
perhaps one valuable article, which may be worth all the rest put
together? How are questions of doubtful claims to heirship to bush
and garden land to be determined? How is the joint ownership of the
gardens to be dealt with, and how is the work there to be apportioned,
and the products of the gardens divided? How are the mutual rights
of the bush land to be regulated, and especially what is to happen
if each of two or more joint owners desires to clear and allocate
to himself as a garden, a specially eligible piece of bush? Such
situations in England would bristle with lawsuits, and I tried to
find out how these questions were actually dealt with by the Mafulu;
but there is no judicial system there, and the only answer I could
get was that in these matters, as in the case of inter-community bush
boundaries and personal bush boundaries, disputes were practically
unknown; though it was pointed out to me, as regards bush land,
that the amount of it belonging to any one family was usually so
large that crowding out could hardly arise.

If a man dies without male descendants in the male line, then, subject
perhaps to some sort of claim of his daughters, if any, to share in
his movable effects, his property goes to his nearest male relative
or relatives in the male line. This would primarily be his father,
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