at in its essential features it must be an inheritance from
prehistoric Aryan antiquity. In its Teutonic form the primitive
village-community (or rather, the spot inhabited by it) is known as the
_Mark_,--that is, a place defined by a boundary-line. One characteristic
of the mark-community is that all its free members are in theory
supposed to be related to each other through descent from a common
progenitor; and in this respect the mark-community agrees with the
_gens_, [Greek: _ginos_], or _clan_. The earliest form of political
union in the world is one which rests, not upon territorial contiguity,
but upon I blood-relationship, either real or assumed through the legal
fiction of adoption. In the lowest savagery blood-relationship is the
only admissible or conceivable ground for sustained common action among
groups of men. Among peoples which wander about, supporting themselves
either by hunting, or at a somewhat more advanced stage of development
by the rearing of flocks and herds, a group of men, thus permanently
associated through ties of blood-relationship, is what we call a _clan_.
When by the development of agricultural pursuits the nomadic mode of
life is brought to an end, when the clan remains stationary upon some
piece of territory surrounded by a strip of forest-land, or other
boundaries natural or artificial, then the clan becomes a
mark-community. The profound linguistic researches of Pictet, Fick, and
others have made it probable that at the time when the Old-Aryan
language was broken up into the dialects from which the existing
languages of Europe are descended, the Aryan tribes were passing from a
purely pastoral stage of barbarism into an incipient agricultural stage,
somewhat like that which characterized the Iroquois tribes in America in
the seventeenth century. The comparative study of institutions leads to
results in harmony with this view, showing us the mark-community of our
Teutonic ancestors with the clear traces of its origin in the more
primitive clan; though, with Mr. Kemble, I do not doubt that by the time
of Tacitus the German tribes had long since reached the
agricultural stage.

Territorially the old Teutonic mark consisted of three divisions. There
was the _village mark_, where the people lived in houses crowded closely
together, no doubt for defensive purposes; there was the _arable mark_,
divided into as many lots as there were householders; and there was the
_common mark_, or border