unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves;
indeed the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in
little beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood possesses
of becoming one day the head of a family himself. The flocks and
herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the father, and
the possessions of the parent, which he holds in a representative
rather than in a proprietary character, are equally divided at his
death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son
sometimes receiving a double share under the name of birthright, but
more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an
honorary precedence. A less obvious inference from the Scriptural
accounts is that they seem to plant us on the traces of the breach
which is first effected in the empire of the parent. The families of
Jacob and Esau separate and form two nations; but the families of
Jacob's children hold together and become a people. This looks like
the immature germ of a state or commonwealth, and of an order of
rights superior to the claims of family relation.

'If I were attempting for the more special purposes of the jurist to
express compendiously the characteristics, of the situation in which
mankind disclose themselves at the dawn of their history, I should
be satisfied to quote a few verses from the "Odyssee" of Homer:--
[Words in Greek.] '"They have neither assemblies for consultation
nor THEMISTES, but everyone exercises jurisdiction over his wives
and his children, and they pay no regard to one another."' And this
description of the beginnings of history is confirmed by what may be
called the last lesson of prehistoric ethnology. Perhaps it is the
most valuable, as it is clearly the most sure result of that
science, that it has dispelled the dreams of other days as to a
primitive high civilisation. History catches man as he emerges, from