It is likewise probable that the same system continued in many cases for some time after men began to cultivate the soil. At least, this would seem to have been the natural arrangement while land was plentiful, and the methods of cultivation crude and soil-exhausting. It would be more profitable to take up new lands than to continue upon the old. Within historical times this system prevailed among the ancient Germans, some of the tribes of New Zealand, and some of the tribes of Western Africa. Where land was not so plentiful it was sometimes redistributed among individuals or heads of families, as often as a death occurred or a new member arrived in the community. Some of the tribes and peoples who observed this practice were the ancient Irish, the aborigines of Peru, Mexico, and parts of what is now the United States, and Australia, and some of the tribes of Africa, India, and Malaysia.[5] Whether the most primitive agricultural systems of every people were of this nature we have, of course, no means of knowing, but the supposition is antecedently probable; for agriculture must have begun very gradually, and been for some time practised in connection with the more primitive methods of obtaining a livelihood. As the land had been held for the most part in common during the hunting and fishing stage and during the pastoral stage, the same arrangement would probably continue until the people found it necessary to cultivate the same tracts of land year after year, and conceived the desire to retain their holdings in stable possession and to transmit them to their children. Moreover, so long as the members of the clan remained strongly conscious of their kinship, and realised the necessity of acting as a unit against their enemies, there would be a strong incentive to clan ownership of the land, and clan allotment of it among the individual members. In other words, the clan would, in these circumstances, have the same motives for common ownership that exist to-day in the family. The oldest historical peoples, the Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Chinese, had private ownership of land at the beginning of their recorded history. Most of them, however, had been cultivating land for a considerable length of time, and had acquired a considerable degree of civilisation, before the earliest period of their existence of which we have any knowledge. It is quite possible that those among them that had passed through the hunting and fishing or the pastoral stage of existence, had practised tribal or common ownership during the earlier portion of their agricultural life. _How the Change Probably Took Place_