worthy of the effort. It appeared to Maitland that one of the obstacles to an exact understanding of the past was the general acceptance of the idea that a normal programme could be laid down for the human race. Even if there were sufficient evidence to show that each independent portion of the human race must move through a fated series of changes, it remained a fact that the rapidly progressive groups had not been independent. "Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors did not arrive at the alphabet or at the Nicene Creed by traversing a long series of 'stages'; they leapt to the one and to the other." And again the complexity and interdependence of human affairs render it impossible to hope for scientific laws which will formulate a sequence of stages in any one province of men's activity. Consequently it was unwise to fill up the blanks that occurred in the history of one nation by institutions and processes which had been observed in another quarter. Even if it were proved that the Roman _gens_ was a close agnatic group, and that the house community was the primitive unit of Roman society, we should not "force our reluctant forefathers through agnatic _gentes_ and house communities." In particular we were not entitled to assume without further enquiry that the early English village community owned land. Such criticisms, implying as they did that the Roman evidence had been accredited with a wider relevance than it did or could possess, were calculated to abate the more sanguine claims alike of comparative jurisprudence and of anthropology. In a subsequent paper contributed to the Eranus Club Maitland recurred to his central thesis, that the experience of the progressive nations was interdependent and unique, and incapable, for that very reason, of affording a basis for an inductive science of politics. It is among the many refreshing qualities of Maitland's work that while he is always close to his facts he is never out of the atmosphere of large and animating ideas.