and of the village is thrown into a mass, and
then it is re-distributed among the families composing the community,
according to their number. This repartition having been effected, the
rights of families and of individuals are again allowed to branch out
into various lines, which they continue to follow till another period
of division comes round. An even more curious variation from this type
of ownership occurs in some of those countries which long formed a
debateable land between the Turkish empire and the possessions of the
House of Austria. In Servia, in Croatia, and the Austrian Sclavonia,
the villages are also brotherhoods of persons who are at once
co-owners and kinsmen; but there the internal arrangements of the
community differ from those adverted to in the last two examples. The
substance of the common property is in this case neither divided in
practice nor considered in theory as divisible, but the entire land is
cultivated by the combined labour of all the villagers, and the
produce is annually distributed among the households, sometimes
according to their supposed wants, sometimes according to rules which
give to particular persons a fixed share of the usufruct. All these
practices are traced by the jurists of the East of Europe to a
principle which is asserted to be found in the earliest Sclavonian
laws, the principle that the property of families cannot be divided
for a perpetuity.

The great interest of these phenomena in an inquiry like the present
arises from the light they throw on the development of distinct
proprietary rights _inside_ the groups by which property seems to have
been originally held. We have the strongest reason for thinking that
property once belonged not to individuals nor even to isolated
families, but to larger societies composed on the patriarchal model;
but the mode of transition from ancient to modern ownerships, obscure
at best, would have been infinitely obscurer if several
distinguishable forms of Village Communities had not been discovered
and examined. It is worth while to attend to the varieties of internal
arrangement within the patriarchal groups which are, or were till
recently, observable among races of Indo-European blood. The chiefs of
the ruder Highland clans used, it is said, to dole out food to the
heads of the households under their jurisdiction at the very shortest
intervals, and sometimes day by day. A periodical distribution is also
made to the Sclavonian