Читать книгу A Brief History of Forestry - B. E. Fernow - Страница 12

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Many of the present conditions, especially those of ownership, as well as the progress in the development both of forest policy and of forest management, can be understood only with some knowledge of the early history of the settlement of the country.[3]

[3] FELIX DAHN, Urgeschichte der germanischen und romanischen Völker, 1881.

As is well known, Aryan tribes from central Asia had more than a thousand years before Christ begun to overrun the country. These belonged to the Keltic (Celtic) or Gaelic race which had gradually come to occupy partly or wholly, France, Spain, northern Italy, the western part of Germany and the British Islands. They were followed by the Germani (supposedly a Celtic word meaning neighbor or brother), also Aryan tribes, who appeared at the Black Sea about 1000 B.C., in Switzerland and Belgium about 100 B.C. These were followed by the Slovenes, Slovaks, or Wends, crowding on behind, disputing and taking possession of the lands left free by, or conquered from the Germani. Through these migrations, by about 400 A.D., the whole of Western Europe seems to have been fully peopled with these tribes of hunters and herders. The mixture of the different elements of victors and vanquished led to differentiation into three classes of people, economically and politically speaking, namely the free, the unfree (serfs or slaves), and the freedmen—an important distinction in the development of property rights.