3. Sir William Hunter suggests that we can distinguish an even earlier stage. “We know,” he says (p. 206), “that the Aryan invaders never penetrated in sufficient numbers into India to engross any large proportion of the soil. That throughout five-sixths of the continent, the actual work of tillage remained in the hands of the Non-Aryan or Sudra races; and that, even at a very remote time, husbandry had become a degrading occupation in the eyes of the Aryan conquerors.... In Orissa, where Aryan colonisation never amounted to more than a thin top-dressing of priests and _nobles_, the generic word of husbandman is sometimes used as a synonym for the Non-Aryan caste. At this day, we see the acknowledged aboriginal castes of the mountains in the very act of passing into the low-caste cultivators of the Hindu village, as soon as Hindu civilisation penetrates their glens.” He thinks it probable, therefore, that the Hindu village is the “outcome” of Non-Aryan Hamlets such as those of the Kandhs. This is not unlikely; but supposing the conjecture to be correct, we must notice two essential points. The first is that the Kandh Hamlet, with its population of, on an average, some five-and-thirty persons, is nothing more than a cluster of independent households, placed close together for mutual protection. The absolute ownership of the soil is vested in each family; and the Hamlet as a whole exercises no corporate authority whatever (pp. 72, 77, 208, 210). And in the second place, if the Hamlet expanded into the village and the village became that “firmly cohering entity” which it now is, land-lordship would seem to have developed _pari passu_ (_Ibid._, pp. 212-3). At no stage of agrarian history do we find the village community of theory, which is “an _organised self-acting_ group of families exercising a _common proprietorship_ over a definite tract of land” (Maine, _Village Communities_, pp. 10, 12). Where the cultivating group are in any real sense proprietors, they have no corporate character; and where they have a corporate character, they are not proprietors. NOTE B.--ON THE RUSSIAN MIR.