This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1872 edition. Excerpt: ... user. vi. VILLAGE-COMMUNITIES IN AMERICA. 201 region of the Continent. It is a very remarkable fact that the earliest English emigrants to North America--who, you know, belonged principally-to the class of yeomanry--organised themselves at first.."-: in village-communities for purposes of cultivation. /;."" When a town was organised, the process was that 'the General Court granted a tract of land to a company of persons. The land was first held by the company as property in common.' (Palfrey, ' History of New England, ' ii. 13.) An American commentator on this passage adds: 'The company of proprietors proceeded to divide the land by assigning first house lots (in Marlborough from fifteen to twenty acres), then tracts of meadow land, and in some cases mineral land, i.e. where bog-iron ore was found. Pasture and woodland remained in common as the property of the company, but a law of the General Court in 1660 provided that "hereafter no cottage or dwelling-house be admitted to the privilege of commonage for wood, timber, or herbage but such as are already in being, or shall be erected with the consent of the town." From that tune the commoners appear as a kind of aristocracy, and the commons were gradually divided up.' This is not only a tolerably exact account of the ancient European and existing Indian village-community, but it is also a history of its natural development, where the causes which turn it into a manorial group are absent, and of its ultimate dissolution. APPENDICES. APPENDIX I.i MINUTE RECORDED ON OCTOBER 1, 1868. The first conclusion which I draw (from a Paper ' showing in each case the authority at whose suggestion the Acts of the Governor-General in Council, from No. I. of 1865, to No. XXXVIII. of 1867, were passed') is, ...