The name is absent

soon have perished, when the Marks coalesced into
the Ga or Shire, and several of the latter became
included in one kingdom. New interests and
duties must then have readily superseded maxims
which belonged to an almost obsolete organiza-
tion.

But in truth, to this question of dispersion and
relationship, considered in its widest generality,
there is no limit either of place or time : it derives,
indeed, some of its charm from the very vagueness
which seems to defy the efforts of the historian :
and even the conviction that a positive and scien-
tific result is unattainable, does not suffice to re-
press the anxiety with which we strive to lift the
veil of our Isis. The question of every settlement,
large or small, ultimately resolves itself into that of
the original migrations of mankind. Unless we
can bring ourselves to adopt the hypothesis of
autochthonous populations,—an hypothesis whose
vagueness is not less than attaches to a system of
gradual, but untraced, advances,—we must fall
back from point to point, until we reach one start-
iι!g-place and one origin. Every family that squats
upon the waste, assumes the existence of two fami-
lies from which it sprang : every household, com-
prising a man and woman, if it is to be fruitful and
continue, presupposes two such households ; each
of these continues to represent two more, in a geo-
metrical progression, whose enormous sum and final
result are lost in the night of ages. The solitary
who wanders away into the uncultivated waste, and
there by degrees rears a family, a tribe and a state,

takes with him the traditions, the dispositions, the
knowledge and the ideas, which he had derived
from others, in turn equally indebted to their pre-
decessors. This state of society, if society it can
be called, is rarely exhibited to our observation.
The backwoodsman in America, or the settler in an
Australian bush, may furnish some means of judg-
ing such a form of civilization ; and the traditions
of Norway and Iceland dimly record a similar pro-
cess : but the solitary labourer, whose constant
warfare with an exulting and exuberant nature does
little more than assure him an independent exist-
ence, has no time to describe the course and the
result of his toils : arid the progress of the modern
settler is recorded less by himself, than by a civi-
lized society, whose offset he is; which watches
his fortunes with interest and judges them with in-
telligence ; which finds in his career the solution of
problems that distract itself, and never forgets that
he yet shares in the cultivation he has left behind
him.

Still the manner in which such solitary house-
holds gradually spread over and occupy a country,
must be nearly the same in all places, where they
exist at all. The family increases in number ; the
arable is extended to provide food ; the pasture
is pushed further and further as the cattle multi-
ply, or as the grasslands become less productive.
Along the banks of the river which may have at-
tracted the feelings or the avarice of the wanderer,
which may have guided his steps in the untracked
wilderness, or supplied the road by which he

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