themselves, can only be
accomplished, if at all, after greater progress has been made in
linguistic and historical inquiries. But there can be no doubt
that, with the Graeco-Italians as with all other nations, agriculture
became and in the mind of the people remained the germ and core of
their national and of their private life. The house and the fixed
hearth, which the husbandman constructs instead of the light hut
and shifting fireplace of the shepherd, are represented in the
spiritual domain and idealized in the goddess Vesta or --Estia--
almost the only divinity not Indo-Germanic yet from the first
common to both nations. One of the oldest legends of the Italian
stock ascribes to king Italus, or, as the Italians must have
pronounced the word, Vitalus or Vitulus, the introduction of the
change from a pastoral to an agricultural life, and shrewdly connects
with it the original Italian legislation. We have simply another
version of the same belief in the legend of the Samnite stock which
makes the ox the leader of their primitive colonies, and in the
oldest Latin national names which designate the people as reapers
(-Siculi-, perhaps also -Sicani-), or as field-labourers (-Opsci-).
It is one of the characteristic incongruities which attach to the
so-called legend of the origin of Rome, that it represents a pastoral
and hunting people as founding a city. Legend and faith, laws and
manners, among the Italians as among the Hellenes are throughout
associated with agriculture.(7)

Cultivation of the soil cannot be conceived without some measurement
of it, however rude. Accordingly, the measures of surface and the
mode of setting off boundaries rest, like agriculture itself, on
a like basis among both peoples. The Oscan and Umbrian -vorsus-
of one hundred square feet corresponds exactly with the Greek
--plethron--. The principle of marking off boundaries was also
the same. The land-measurer adjusted his position with reference
to one of the cardinal points, and proceeded to draw in the first
place two lines, one from north to south, and another from east to
west, his station being at their point of intersection (-templum-,
--temenos-- from --temno--); then he drew at certain fixed distances
lines parallel to these, and by this process produced a series of
rectangular pieces of ground, the corners of which were marked by
boundary posts (-termini-, in Sicilian inscriptions -termones-,
usually --oroi--). This mode