but he must first have the
consent of the Village, and the purchaser steps exactly into his place
and takes up all his obligations. If a family becomes extinct, its
share returns to the common stock."

Some considerations which have been offered in the fifth chapter of
this volume will assist the reader, I trust, in appreciating the
significance of Elphinstone's language. No institution of the
primitive world is likely to have been preserved to our day, unless it
has acquired an elasticity foreign to its original nature through some
vivifying legal fiction. The Village Community then is not necessarily
an assemblage of blood-relations, but it is _either_ such an
assemblage _or_ a body of co-proprietors formed on the model of an
association of kinsmen. The type with which it should be compared is
evidently not the Roman Family, but the Roman Gens or House. The Gens
was also a group on the model of the family; it was the family
extended by a variety of fictions of which the exact nature was lost
in antiquity. In historical times, its leading characteristics were
the very two which Elphinstone remarks in the Village Community. There
was always the assumption of a common origin, an assumption sometimes
notoriously at variance with fact; and, to repeat the historian's
words, "if a family became extinct, its share returned to the common
stock." In old Roman law, unclaimed inheritances escheated to the
Gentiles. It is further suspected by all who have examined their
history that the Communities, like the Gentes, have been very
generally adulterated by the admission of strangers, but the exact
mode of absorption cannot now be ascertained. At present, they are
recruited, as Elphinstone tells us, by the admission of purchasers,
with the consent of the brotherhood. The acquisition of the adopted
member is, however, of the nature of a universal succession; together
with the share he has bought, he succeeds to the liabilities which the
vendor had incurred towards the aggregate group. He is an Emptor
Familiae, and inherits the legal clothing of the person whose place he
begins to fill. The consent of the whole brotherhood required for his
admission may remind us of the consent which the Comitia Curiata, the
Parliament of that larger brotherhood of self-styled kinsmen, the
ancient Roman commonwealth, so strenuously insisted on as essential to
the legalisation of an Adoption or the confirmation of a Will.

The tokens of an extreme a