In the chapter on Property Maine again shows that the theory of its origin in occupancy is too individualistic and that not separate ownership but joint ownership is the really archaic institution. The father was in some sense (we must avoid importing modern terms) the trustee of the joint property of the family. Here Maine makes an excursion into the fields of the Early Village Community, and has, too, to look elsewhere than to Rome, where the village community had already been transformed by coalescence into the city-state. He therefore seeks his examples from India and points to the Indian village as an example of the expansion of the family into a larger group of co-proprietors, larger but still bearing traces of its origin to the patriarchal power. And, to quote his own words, "the most important passage in the history of Private Property is its gradual separation from the co-ownership of kinsmen." The chapter on Contract, although it contains some of Maine's most suggestive writing, and the chapter on Delict and Crime, have a less direct bearing on his main thesis except in so far as they go to show that the reason why there is so little in early law of what we call civil, as distinct from criminal, law, and in particular of the Law of Contract, is to be found in the fact that, in the infancy of society, the Law of Persons, and with it the law of civil rights, is merged in the common subjection to Paternal Power. Such, putting it in the simplest possible language, is the main argument of _Ancient Law_. The exigencies of space and of simplicity compel me to pass by, to a large extent, most of the other topics with which Maine deals--the place of custom, code, and fiction in the development of early law, the affiliation of international Law to the _Jus Gentium_ and the Law of Nature, the origins of feudalism and of primogeniture, the early history of delict and crime, and that most remarkable and profound passage in which Maine shows the heavy debt of the various sciences to Roman law and the influence which it has exerted on the vocabulary of political science, the concepts of moral philosophy, and the doctrines of theology. I must confine myself to two questions: how far did Maine develop or modify in his subsequent writings the main thesis of _Ancient Law_? to what extent has this thesis stood the test of the criticism and research of others? As regards the first point, it is to be remembered that _Ancient Law_ is but the first, though doubtless the most important, of a whole series of works by its author on the subject of early law. It was followed at intervals by three volumes: _Village Communities in the East and West_, _Early Institutions_, and _Early Law and_ _Custom_. In the first of these he dealt with a subject which has excited an enormous degree of attention and not a little controversy among English, French, German, and Russian scholars,[2] amounting as it does to