perhaps receiving and rearing children of other parents sent to them.
As modern life does not comprise either the custom or a reason for
it, we may assume that fosterage was a consequence of the clan
system, and that its practice strengthened the ties of kinship and
sympathy. This conjecture is corroborated by the numerous instances
in history and in story of fosterage affection proving, when tested,
stronger than the natural affection of relatives by birth. What is
more, long after the dissolution of the clans, fosterage has
continued stealthily in certain districts in which the old race of
chiefs and clansmen contrived to cling together to the old sod; and
the affection generated by it has been demonstrated, down to the
middle of the nineteenth century. The present writer has heard it
spoken of lovingly, in half-Irish, by simple old people, whom to
question would be cruel and irreverent.

LAND LAW. The entire territory was originally, and always continued
to be, the absolute property of the entire clan. Not even the private
residence of a clansman, with its _maighin digona_ = little lawn or
precinct of sanctuary, within which himself and his family and
property were inviolable, could be sold to an outsider. Private
ownership, though rather favored in the administration of the law,
was prevented from becoming general by the fundamental ownership of
the clan and the birthright of every free-born clansman to a
sufficiency of the land of his native territory for his subsistence.
The land officially held as described was not, until the population
became numerous, a serious encroachment upon this right. What
remained outside this and the residential patches of private land was
classified as cultivable and uncultivable. The former was the common
property of the clansmen, but was held and used in severalty for the
time being, subject to _gabhail-cine_ (gowal-kinneh)--clan-resumption