men once united should find their lot cast apart, and themselves divided into distant communities! Nor in this can we recognize anything resembling the solemn planting of a Grecian, far less of a Roman, colony; or suppose that any notion of a common origin survived to nourish feelings of friendship between bodies of men, so established in different lands. Even had such traditions originally prevailed, they must soon have perished, when the Marks coalesced into the Gá or Shire, and several of the latter became included in one kingdom. New interests and duties must then have readily superseded maxims which belonged to an almost obsolete organization. ----- Footnote 123: Æscings in Essex, Somerset and Sussex: Alings in Kent, Dorset, Devonshire and Lincoln: Ardings in Sussex, Berks and Northamptonshire: Arlings in Devonshire, Gloucestershire and Sussex: Banings in Hertfordshire, Kent, Lincolnshire and Salop: Beadings in Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex and the Isle of Wight: Berings in Kent, Devonshire, Herefordshire, Lincolnshire, Salop and Somerset: Billings in Bedfordshire, Durham, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Salop, Sussex and the Isle of Wight, etc. ----- But in truth, to this question of dispersion and relationship, considered in its widest generality, there is no limit either of place or time: it derives, indeed, some of its charm from the very vagueness which seems to defy the efforts of the historian: and even the conviction that a positive and scientific result is unattainable, does not suffice to repress the anxiety with which we strive to lift the veil of our Isis. The question of every settlement, large or small, ultimately resolves itself into that of the original migrations of mankind. Unless we can bring ourselves to adopt the hypothesis of autochthonous populations,—an hypothesis whose vagueness is not less than attaches to a system of gradual, but untraced, advances,—we must fall back from point to point, until we reach one starting-place and one origin. Every family that squats upon the waste, assumes the existence of two families from which it sprang: every household, comprising a man and woman, if it is to be fruitful and continue, presupposes two such households; each of these continues to represent two more, in a geometrical progression, whose enormous sum and final result are lost in the night of ages. The solitary who wanders away into the uncultivated waste, and there by degrees rears a family, a tribe and a state, takes with him the traditions, the dispositions, the knowledge and the ideas, which he had derived from others, in turn equally indebted to their predecessors. This state of society, if society it can be called, is rarely exhibited to our observation. The backwoodsman in America, or the settler in an Australian bush, may furnish some means of judging such a form of civilization; and the traditions of Norway and Iceland dimly