And so the passage from Cæsar cannot be explained away as M. de Jubainville would wish. He cannot get rid of the fact that Cæsar records in so many words that inheritance and boundaries were to be found amongst the Gauls; the very opposite, that is, of community in land. He gets together from other sources a variety of arguments which appear to him to show that the Gauls held their land in common. They are as follows: 1, Polybius says (II. 17) that the Gauls of Italy did not cultivate the land; 2, in Cæsar’s time the Helvetii wished to leave their country in order to settle in a more fruitful one; 3, the Ædui admitted into their country ten thousand Boii and gave them land; 4, there was in Gallic law a custom according to which a husband and wife threw into a common stock an equal portion of the possessions of each, and allowed the income arising from this property to accumulate, so that the whole, principal and interest, might belong to the survivor. These four circumstances are supposed to prove that private property in land did not exist.[250] Not one of the four appears to me to bear with it this consequence. Examine them one by one. I. The passage from Polybius refers, not to the Gauls of his own time, but to the Gauls who invaded Italy five centuries before, and who drove out the Etruscans from the district of the Po. The historian says that these invaders, being inclined to pursue their conquests, did not at first settle down and cultivate the soil, but lived on the produce of their herds. His information bears upon the Gauls at one particular moment in their history, at the time when they were planning an attack upon central Italy. It proves nothing at all about the Gauls in general, and certainly nothing about the Gauls of the time of Cæsar. II. That the Helvetii wished to emigrate does not imply that they lived under a system of community in land. It merely implies that they preferred the soft climate and fertile plains of the south-west of Gaul to their own rugged and mountainous country. Is it an unknown thing for peasant proprietors to emigrate for the sake of seeking a more productive soil elsewhere? III. Because the Ædui invited ten thousand Boii to settle in their country, does that prove that private property was unknown to them? Not at all. The _civitas Æduorum_, which covered a considerable area and included five of our departments, might very probably have had so large an extent of public domain, or been able to find enough unoccupied land, to admit ten thousand new cultivators. Such a circumstance, following, as it does, immediately after the ravages of Ariovistus, can easily be explained, and is not the slightest evidence of communism in land.