The hot and ceaseless controversy as to whether or not the Germans had already made a definite repartition of the cultivated land at Tacitus' time, and how the passages relating to this question should be interpreted, is now a thing of the past. After the following facts had been established: that the cultivated land of nearly all nations was tilled collectively by the gens and later on by communistic family groups, a practice which Cesar still found among the Suebi; that as a result of this practice the land was re-apportioned periodically; and that this periodical repartition of the cultivated land was preserved in Germany down to our days--after such evidence we need not waste any more breath on the subject. A transition within 150 years from collective cultivation, such as Cesar expressly attributes to the Suebi, to individual cultivation with annual repartition of the soil, such as Tacitus found among the Germans, is surely progress enough for any one. The further transition from this stage to complete private ownership of land during such a short period and without any external intervention would involve an absolute impossibility. Hence I can only read in Tacitus what he states in so many words: They change (or re-divide) the cultivated land every year, and enough land is left for common use. It is the stage of agriculture and appropriation of the soil which exactly tallies with the contemporaneous gentile constitution of the Germans. I leave the preceding paragraph unchanged, just as it stood in former editions. Meantime the question has assumed another aspect. Since Kovalevsky has demonstrated that the patriarchal household community existed nearly everywhere, perhaps even everywhere, as the connecting link between the matriarchal communistic and the modern isolated family, the question is no longer "Collective property or private property?" as discussed between Maurer and Waitz, but "What was the form of that collective property?" Not alone is there no doubt whatever, that the Suebi were the collective owners of their land at Cesar's time, but also that they tilled the soil collectively. The questions, whether their economic unit was the gens, or the household, or an intermediate communistic group, or whether all three of these groups existed at the same time as a result of different local conditions, may remain undecided for a long while yet. Kovalevsky maintains that the conditions described by Tacitus were not founded on the mark or village community, but on the household community, which developed much later into the village community by the growth of the population.