nothing less than an investigation into the origin of private property in land. The question has been put in various forms: did it commence with joint (or, as some would put it, less justifiably, communal or corporate) ownership or with individual ownership, and again was the village community free or servile? It is now pretty generally recognised that there was more than one type, though common cultivation was doubtless a feature of them all, and even in India there were at least two types, of which the one presenting several, as opposed to communal, ownership is not the less ancient. But it may well be that, as Maitland so often pointed out, much of the controversy has been literally an anachronism; that is to say, that nineteenth-century men have been asking the Early Ages questions which they could not answer and reading back into early history distinctions which are themselves historical products. Ownership is itself a late abstraction developed out of use. We may say with some certainty that family "ownership" preceded individual ownership, but in what sense there was communal ownership by a whole village it is not so easy to say. Maine was on surer ground when, as in his studies of Irish and Hindu law, he confined himself to the more immediate circle of the family group. In his _Early Institutions_ he subjects the Brehon Laws of early Ireland to a suggestive examination as presenting an example of Celtic law largely unaffected by Roman influences. He there shows, as he has shown in _Ancient Law_, that in early times the only social brotherhood recognised was that of kinship, and that almost every form of social organisation, tribe, guild, and religious fraternity, was conceived of under a similitude of it. Feudalism converted the village community, based on a real or assumed consanguinity of its members, into the fief in which the relations of tenant and lord were those of contract, while those of the unfree tenant rested on status. In his _Early Law and Custom_ he pursues much the same theme by an examination of Hindu Law as presenting a peculiarly close implication of early law with religion. Here he devotes his attention chiefly to Ancestor-worship, a subject which about this time had engaged the attention, as regards its Greek and Roman forms, of that brilliant Frenchman, Fustel de Coulanges, whose monograph _La Cite Antique_ is now a classic. As is well known, the right of inheriting a dead man's property and the duty of performing his obsequies are co-relative to this day in Hindu law, and his investigation of this subject brings Maine back to the subject of the Patriarchal Power. He points out that both worshipper and the object of worship were exclusively males, and concludes that it was the power of the father which generated the practice of worshipping him, while this practice in turn, by the gradual admission of women to participate in the ceremonies, gradually acted as a solvent upon the power itself. The necessity of finding