The evidence alluded to is that of _local names_ ending in the remarkable suffix _ing_ or _ingas_. It is needful to examine this evidence, notwithstanding its difficult and doubtful nature. It raises a question upon which the last word has by no means yet been spoken, and out of which interesting and important results may eventually spring. The impossibility of arriving, in the present state of the evidence, at a positive conclusion, is no reason why its apparent bearing should not be stated, provided that suggestion and hypothesis be not confounded with verified fact. At all events, the inquiry pursued in this essay would be open to the charge of being one-sided if it were not alluded to. «Do they represent clan settlements?» The reader of recent literature bearing upon the history of the English conquest of Britain will have been struck by the confidence and skill with which, in the absence of historical, or even, in some cases, traditional evidence, the story of the invasion and occupation of England has been sometimes created out of little more than the combination of physical geography with local names, on the hypothesis that local names ending in '_ing_,' or its plural form '_ingas_,' represent the original _clan settlements_ of the German conquerors. Writers who rely upon G. L. Von Maurer's theory of the German _mark-system_ have also naturally called attention to local names with this suffix as evidence of settlements on the basis of the _free village community_ as opposed to those of a manorial type. Local names with this suffix, it is hardly needful to say, are found on the Continent as well as in England. [p348] How, it may well be asked, does the evidence they afford of _clan settlements_ or _free village communities_ comport with the thoroughly manorial character of the German settlements on the lines described by Tacitus? «What Germans did Tacitus describe?» Now, in order to answer this question, it must first be considered how far the description of Tacitus covers the whole field--whether it refers to the Germans as a whole, or whether only to those tribes who had come within Roman influences, and so had sooner, perhaps, than the rest, relinquished their earlier tribal habits to follow manorial lines. So far as his description is geographical it is very methodical. «Those within the _limes_.»