Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/239

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 223

had disappeared, and there can no longer be any question regard- ing the supposed natural frontiers of Gaul, since it was included within the Roman Empire. What, then, are these pretended natural frontiers which never are frontiers ?

In Gaul all the traditional forms of the tribes were overthrown at the point where we see the name of the chief generally substi- tuted for that of the civitas. On the contrary, in the three Gauls we see the principal place take the name of the civitas; thus Lute- teia was called Parisii. ,

Gaul was only a geographical expression ; Galates and Gauls are Celts ; they are the successive names of the same population. They crossed over the Pyrenees, and toward the northeast ex- tended, by way of the valley of the Danube, as far as the Scythi- ans, with whom they mixed at their extremities, and formed the Celtoscythians. All the consecutive divisions and differentiations of the Celts are purely sociological divisions and differentiations ; that is to say, they are more complex than those which are only physical. The Germans themselves appear to have been only Celts or Gauls whose type was preserved in its purity for a longer time.

Less advanced in civilization than their brothers in Gaul proper, the Germans, according to Tacitus, still lived separately and dispersed, in discontiguous village settlements, surrounded by unoccupied territory. The lands were occupied by all the tribes successively, and in proportion to the number of cultivators ; they were distributed according to the rank of each. The vast extent of their plains facilitated these divisions. They changed their pieces of ground each year, and there was always free land ; they did not, therefore, need to take account of the fertility and the extent of their lands. They raised only wheat; they seem neither to have planted vineyards nor to have inclosed meadows. They were at once hunting, pastoral, and agricultural tribes, partly sedentary and partly migratory. According to Tacitus, 1 these populations were held within natural that is to say, physi- cal limits : the Rhine, the Danube, the mountains, the ocean. But Tacitus recognized that the Cimbri, having set out from Jut- land, encamped simultaneously upon both banks of the Rhine,

1 Germania, I, xvi, xx.