Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

AGRICULTURE. 211
sponsible for tlie rent. These associations produced
the groups of houses called towns, which are marked as
villages in the maps. This system is so far from being
expired, that many such towns and joint farms maybe
found all over the country : even on the Lowland border,
and in the very centre of systems of large farms and im-
proved cultivation. But in the ancient practice, there
was added the holding by run-rig ;
by which every indi-
vidual in the joint farm was obliged to change his lot or
ridge every year, with some other person belonging to
it. It would not be easy to invent a worse method of
treating land, or of checking the industry of tenants ;
but
I believe that it is totally abolished, though the name
continues to be occasionally used.
This seems to have been a common practice among the
German tribes, and appears to be a part of that to which
Tacitus alludes when he says, " agri ab universis per
vices occupantur; arva per annos mutant." I wish Tacitus
had been a German Professor himself, and had made
his book a folio instead of writino- in enigmas, as he too
often does. If a great book is a bad thing, because it
contains more than you want, it is at least better than
that which contains less. I know not any writer whom
we long more to beat into speaking, as Epaminondas
threshed the Spartans out of their affectation of short
speeches into long ones ; into politeness, as he calls it.
Whatever the entire meaning of this passage is. Black-
stone considers that it relates, by comparison, to the feudal
holdings which were first at the lord's will and then ren-
dered certain for one or more years, while, in Germany,
the lands were annually divided by the leaders in gene-
ral councils. This explanation is, indeed, confirmed by
what Caesar says of the Gauls, that " neque quisquam
aeri modum certum habet :" bat that the magistrates