Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/552

 496 them by political movements, of which they took little heed; but tenants with a history that began long before lawyers were known. It is that history which Mr. Ashley and his school ignore, by post-dating it to the times of legal treatises.

It is quite impossible to do justice to M. D'Arbois de Jubainville's learned treatise. It takes up the question of the origin of property in land from a different standpoint to that of Fustel de Coulanges, and the author brings to his task the rare combination of a thorough knowledge, both of philological and historical science. His derivations of place-names in France during the Celtic and Roman periods, showing that places are named from their owners, are invaluable to the student, and few things are better worth the attention of English philologists than the corresponding evidence, if it exists, in Britain. The chapters on the inequality of the people of Gaul at the time of Cæsar's conquest, and on agriculture in Gaul, are particularly interesting. Of course the old questions crop up: who were the client class of the people of Gaul? who were the agriculturists? Cicero's estimate of the Gaul's objection to manual labour, objected to by our author on the score of oratorical exaggeration, might be justified by more than one comparison with haughty Aryan tribes living with a subject non- Aryan class at their feet. But the question is ever present to the student of European social phenomena, as to how far he may legitimately interpret evidence, so overladen with a political terminology, which is still a living terminology, by the light of evidence which has no such difficulty to contend with. I confess that M. D'Arbois de Jubainville's treatise does not lessen this difficulty, because by throwing such a powerful light upon historical evidences it pushes into the background what is to be gained by comparative evidences.

If Professor Kovalevsky's and Dr. Cherry's lectures do not obtain a very long notice in order to show their connection with the best recent literature of institutions, it is