In recent times, through the influence of ethnology, jurisprudence has entered on a new epoch. A new branch of the science of law has arisen in Europe, the so-called ethnological jurisprudence, and has already found in Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, and Holland, enthusiastic supporters. Ethnology, as it is known, is the science that has for the subject of its investigations the totality of phenomena of social life of all the peoples of the earth, and which makes use, in this investigation, of the methods of inductive inquiry exclusively employed by physical and natural science. After the science of ethnology had advanced to a certain point, the extension of ethnological inquiry to the domain of jurisprudence followed as of course. To a certain extent the investigations of the history of law had prepared the way for ethnological jurisprudence. The inductive method was common to both. The idea of a history of the development of law was no longer strange to jurisprudence. Only the courage was wanting to allow the eye to range over the legal systems of all the peoples of the globe, instead of, as before, restricting it to very narrow limits. The historical investigation of law began in Europe with the history of the Roman law. Thereupon it was immediately extended to the Germanic laws of Europe, so that now all West-European peoples possess a highly developed history of law of their own. Recently, also, the history of Slavonic law has been assiduously treated. Whereas in every case here it was a question of the sources of the laws that stood in immediate historical connection with the prevailing systems of Europe, jurisprudential investigation was slowly extended to more remote ethnical fields. The first impulse in this direction came from comparative philology. This science had succeeded in tracing the languages of extended groups of peoples back to common primitive tongues. Among these primitive tongues the Aryan, the common original language of the Indo-Germanic group of nations, first occupied the attention of inquirers, and the law of this group of nations thus became the first object of investigation of a comparative jurisprudence extending beyond the more restricted provinces of the history of law. The provinces of Græco-Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Iranic, and Indian law were investigated with respect to a common origin, and various agreements and various deviations were discovered. In very recent times the laws of the Armenians and the Ossetes in the Caucasus have been added to the laws of the Aryans, and the laws of the Afghans will probably soon follow these.