Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin (ebook reader play store .txt) 📕

terms as Ida Pfeiffer. Let me add that Mary Kingsley speaks in her book on West Africa in the same sympathetic terms of the Fans, who had been represented formerly as the most “terrible cannibals.” ↩

Ida Pfeiffer, Meine zweite Weltriese, Wien, 1856, vol. i, pp. 116 seq. See also Muller and Temminch’s Dutch Possessions in Archipelagic India, quoted by Elisée Reclus, in Géographie Universelle, xiii. ↩

Descent of Man, second ed., pp. 63, 64. ↩

See Bastian’s Mensch in der Geschichte, iii, p. 7. Also Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in Northwest and Western Australia ii, p. 238. ↩

Miklukho-Maclay, Mensch in der Geschichte. Same habit with the Hottentots. ↩

Numberless traces of post-pliocene lakes, now disappeared, are found over Central, West, and North Asia. Shells of the same species as those now found in the Caspian Sea are scattered over the surface of the soil as far East as halfway to Lake Aral, and are found in recent deposits as far north as Kazan. Traces of Caspian Gulfs, formerly taken for old beds of the Amu, intersect the Turcoman territory. Deduction must surely be made for temporary, periodical oscillations. But with all that, desiccation is evident, and it progresses at a formerly unexpected speed. Even in the relatively wet parts of Southwest Siberia, the succession of reliable surveys, recently published by Yadrintseff, shows that villages have grown up on what was, eighty years ago, the bottom of one of the lakes of the Tchany group; while the other lakes of the same group, which covered hundreds of square miles some fifty years ago, are now mere ponds. In short, the desiccation of Northwest Asia goes on at a rate which must be measured by centuries, instead of by the geological units of time of which we formerly used to speak. ↩

Whole civilizations had thus disappeared, as is proved now by the remarkable discoveries in Mongolia on the Orkhon and in the Lukchun depression (by Dmitri Clements). ↩

If I follow the opinions of (to name modern specialists only) Nasse, Kovalevsky, and Vinogradov, and not those of Mr. Seebohm (Mr. Denman Ross can only be named for the sake of completeness), it is not only because of the deep knowledge and concordance of views of these three writers, but also on account of their perfect knowledge of the village community altogether⁠—a knowledge the want of which is much felt in the otherwise remarkable work of Mr. Seebohm. The same remark applies, in a still higher degree, to the most elegant writings of Fustel de Coulanges, whose opinions and passionate interpretations of old texts are confined to himself. ↩

The literature of the village community is so vast that but a few works can be named. Those of Sir Henry Maine, Mr. Seebohm, and Walter’s Das alte Wallis (Bonn, 1859), are well-known popular sources of information about Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. For France, P. Viollet, Précis de l’histoire du droit français: Droit privé, 1886, and several of his monographs in Bibl. de l’École des Chartes; Babeau, Le Village sous l’ancien régime (the mir in the eighteenth century), third edition, 1887; Bonnemère, Doniol, etc. For Italy and Scandinavia, the chief works are named in Laveleye’s Primitive Property, German version by K. Bücher. For the Finns, Rein’s Föreläsningar, i, 16; Koskinen, Finnische Geschichte, 1874, and various monographs. For the Lives and Coures, Prof. Lutchitzky in Severnyi Vestnik, 1891. For the Teutons, besides the well-known works of Maurer, Sohm (Altdeutsche Reichs- und Gerichts-Verfassung), also Dahn (Urzeit, Völkerwanderung, Langobardische Studien), Janssen, Wilh. Arnold, etc. For India, besides H. Maine and the works he names, Sir John Phear’s Aryan Village. For Russia and South Slavonians, see Kavelin, Posnikoff, Sokolovsky, Kovalevsky, Efimenko, Ivanisheff, Klaus, etc. (copious bibliographical index up to 1880 in the Sbornik svedeniy ob obschinye of the Russ. Geog. Soc.). For general conclusions, besides Laveleye’s Propriété, Morgan’s Ancient Society, Lippert’s Kulturgeschichte, Post, Dargun, etc., also the lectures of M. Kovalevsky (Tableau des origines et de l’evolution de la famille et de la propriété, Stockholm, 1890). Many special monographs ought to be mentioned; their titles may be found in the excellent lists given by P. Viollet in Droit privé and Droit public. For other races, see subsequent notes. ↩

Several authorities are inclined to consider the joint household as an intermediate stage between the clan and the village community; and there is no doubt that in very many cases village communities have grown up out of undivided families. Nevertheless, I consider the joint household as a fact of a different order. We find it within the gentes; on the other hand, we cannot affirm that joint families have existed at any period without belonging either to a gens or to a village community, or to a Gau. I conceive the early village communities as slowly originating directly from the gentes, and consisting, according to racial and local circumstances, either of several joint families, or of both joint and simple families, or (especially in the case of new settlements) of simple families only. If this view be correct, we should not have the right of establishing the series: gens, compound family, village community⁠—the second member of the series having not the same ethnological value as the two others. See Appendix IX. ↩

Stobbe, Beitrëg zur Geschichte