being a member of the community, is never paid for his work within the community.  He must make it for nothing, and if he utilizes his spare time for fabricating the small plates of chiselled and silvered iron which are used in Buryate land for the decoration of dress, he may occasionally sell them to a woman from another clan, but to the women of his own clan the attire is presented as a gift.  Selling and buying cannot take place within the community, and the rule is so severe that when a richer family hires a labourer the labourer must be taken from another clan or from among the Russians.  This habit is evidently not specific to the Buryates; it is so widely spread among the modern barbarians, Aryan and Ural-Altayan, that it must have been universal among our ancestors.

The feeling of union within the confederation is kept alive by the common interests of the tribes, their folkmotes, and the festivities which are usually kept in connection with the folkmotes.  The same feeling is, however, maintained by another institution, the aba, or common hunt, which is a reminiscence of a very remote past.  Every autumn, the forty-six clans of Kudinsk come together for such a hunt, the produce of which is divided among all the families.  Moreover, national abas, to assert the unity of the whole Buryate nation, are convoked from time to time.  In such cases, all Buryate clans which are scattered for hundreds of miles west and east of Lake Baikal, are bound to send their delegate hunters.  Thousands of men come together, each one bringing provisions for a whole month.  Every one’s share must be equal to all the others, and therefore, before being put together, they are weighed by an elected elder (always “with the hand”:  scales would be a profanation of the old custom).  After that the hunters divide into bands of twenty, and the parties go hunting according to a well-settled plan.  In such abas the entire Buryate nation revives its epic traditions of a time when it was united in a powerful league.  Let me add that such communal hunts are quite usual with the Red Indians and the Chinese on the banks of the Usuri (the kada).(32)

With the Kabyles, whose manners of life have been so well described by two French explorers,(33) we have barbarians still more advanced in agriculture.  Their fields, irrigated and manured, are well attended to, and in the hilly tracts every available plot of land is cultivated by the spade.  The Kabyles have known many vicissitudes in their history; they have followed for sometime the Mussulman law of inheritance, but, being adverse to it, they have returned, 150 years ago, to the tribal customary law of old.  Accordingly, their land-tenure is of a mixed character, and private property in land exists side by side with communal possession.  Still, the basis of their present organization is the village community, the thaddart, which usually consists of several joint families (kharoubas), claiming a community of origin, as well as of smaller families of strangers.  Several villages are grouped into clans or tribes (arch); several tribes make the confederation (thak’ebilt); and several confederations may occasionally enter into a league, chiefly for purposes of armed defence.