Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/556

 542 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

problem is to understand the nature of the structure which differ- entiates the city from other types of establishment ; and to solve this problem it is necessary to arrive at a general classification of these types.

Cantillon, who, in his Essai sur la nature du commerce, was among the first to attempt a classification^*^ has distinguished four types of habitation : the village,^^ the town, the city, the capital. The classification in use today is more simple. It distinguishes the isolated farm, the village, the city. The one here proposed is more simple still. It distinguishes only two main types of establishment, each comprehending a certain number of sub-types.

The first category has to do with simple establishments, i. e., with a single social group. It includes what may be termed briefly the farm, composed of a single family ; the hamlet and the village, composed of a number of families which form among themselves a unit community, a single political and social organism. The purest type of the village is the long house, such as that found among the American Indians or in Oceania, where all the mem- bers of the village live in common in a single house, ^^ each family possessing for private use only a single compartment. At its

"•It is necessary to mention, as earlier still, Botero (Delle cause delle grandezza e tnagnificenza cittd, Rome, 1588) who dwelt on the conditions and physical limitations of the development of cities. The importance of the same for statistics and sociology has been perceived by Kovalewsky. See his memoir on Botero in Vol. Ill of the Annates de I'institut international de sociologie.

"^ He does not speak of the isolated farm, which was doubtless still rare in his time, but which was to be found everywhere in England since the eleventh century. See Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, Oxford, 1908, pp. 264, 267, 268; Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 15, 16. A little later, Steuart, in his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (Works, London, 1805), I, 59 ff., in chap, ix, entitled, "What Are the Princi- ples Which Regulate the Distribution of Inhabitants into Farms, Villages, Ham- lets, Towns, and Cities?" completed from this point of view the classification of Cantillon and distinguished the farm, the hamlet, the village, and the city.

containing i6o persons. De Morgan, in Les premieres civilisations, Etudes sur la prihistoire et I'histoire, 1909, p. 121, points out that in the eighteenth cen- tury the populations of Kamchatka lived in a sort of subterranean house of from 20 to 100 meters in length and from 6 to 10 meters in width, divided into compartments, and where as many as 300 people crowded together.
 * " See Morgan, Ancient Society, New York, 1878, p. 399, who cites houses