A mind so exact and disinterested and endowed with so rare a capacity for divesting itself of the intellectual accretions of its own age was naturally full of dissolvents for ambitious theories. Maitland expressed in his Inaugural lecture his high respect for the genius and learning of Henry Maine, and nothing which was then written would have been afterwards retracted. Yet the close study of English medieval law had brought him to the conclusion that some of the generalisations to which Maine seemed disposed to assign a general validity, at least for the Indo-Germanic races, received no adequate support from the English evidence. In a brilliant discussion of the antiquities of inheritance he argues that in the present state of the evidence it would be rash to accept "family ownership," or in other words a strong form of birth-right, as an institution which once prevailed among the English in England. Maine, operating chiefly with Roman law but also drawing upon Teutonic, Slavonic and even Indian evidence, had argued that the primitive unit of society was an agnatic patriarchal group and that the ownership of land was vested in a family or clan constructed on strict agnatic principles and governed by the paterfamilias. Maitland submits the conception of common ownership to analysis. Common ownership implies corporate ownership, and the idea of a corporation is modern, not primitive. Co-ownership indeed there was, but co-ownership spells individualism. If there is a law which declares how shares should be distributed among the members of the group upon partition, then there is a law which assigns ideal shares in the unpartitioned land. There was no proof that anything which ought to be called family-ownership existed among the Anglo-Saxons; there was no proof of the patriarchal _gens_, of the agnatic group. On the contrary there was a grave difficulty in accepting the patriarchal family as the primitive unit of English society, for the earliest rules about Anglo-Saxon inheritance and the Anglo-Saxon blood-feud exhibit the fact that "the persons who must bear the feud and who may share the weregild are partly related through the father and partly through the mother." Birth-rights indeed there were, but birth-rights do not imply agnation or corporate ownership. In some cases they may even be the consequence of intestate succession. Submitted to concrete tests of this character the evidence for the strict agnatic land-owning group in England became in Maitland's eyes very ghostly[23]. "In Agnation," wrote Maine, "is to be sought the explanation of that extraordinary rule of English law which prohibited brothers of the half-blood from succeeding to one another's lands." Maitland's solution of "this extraordinary rule" is very different and highly characteristic of his concrete, practical turn of mind. In his opinion it is "neither a very ancient nor a very deep-seated phenomenon." He points out that the problem of dealing