A number of more remote provinces of law have also been entered upon, in connection with theological, philological, and connate inquiries. Thus, particularly, in connection with biblical investigation the Israelitic law, in connection with the study of Arabic the Islamitic, in connection with the decipherment of the hieroglyphic writings the Old-Egyptian, in connection with the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions the Soumerian and the Assyrian-Babylonian, and in connection with sinology the law of China. In very recent times the Japanese law has also been treated. In the laws of all these peoples, by the side of many peculiarities, were also found many phenomena of frequent and universal recurrence. After the science of law had so far extended its activity in this direction, it was a final step only that ethnological jurisprudence took when it declared that the subject of juristic science was the investigation of the laws of _all_ the peoples of the earth. And yet this step was perhaps a more important one than all that had hitherto been taken. For a considerable group of peoples had up to then been entirely neglected by the science of law, namely the uncivilised peoples, the so-called primitive peoples or _Naturvölker_. And just the laws of these savages furnished the most remarkable disclosures. They exhibited everywhere the most singular parallel phenomena, and made it possible to open up a complete early history of the law, and to bring to light periods of jural development of which the history of civilised peoples has preserved but a few unintelligible remains. Ethnological jurisprudence is thus able to supply complementary information at a point where the threads of the history of law are lost in the obscurity of early times. The condition of jural life in these primitive periods is very singular. No juristic philosopher has ever lighted on the idea that primitive man could exist with such jural conceptions as he actually does. That which ethnological jurisprudence has brought to light in this connection is something absolutely new and astonishing, something that no brooding brain could have ever developed out of any idea or principle. Indeed, it is so strange that it could not be conceived at all if we did not have it before our eyes to-day among savage tribes. The collecting of the laws of uncivilised peoples constitutes an independent task of ethnological jurisprudence. In this way the latter science will fill up the gaps which historical jurisprudential inquiry left open in our knowledge of the jural life of man. But more important than all, perhaps, will ethnological jurisprudence become for the future development of the philosophy of law. In this connection it goes hand in hand with the sociological tendency which dominates our time and has its surest foundation in ethnology. The prime significance of ethnological jurisprudence lies in the fact that it is an ethnological science.