The political progress of primitive society
seems to have consisted largely in the coalescence of these small groups
into larger groups. The first series of compound groups resulting from
the coalescence of adjacent marks is that which was known in nearly all
Teutonic lands as the _hundred_, in Athens as the [Greek: _phratria_] or
_brotherhood_, in Rome as the _curia_. Yet alongside of the Roman group
called the _curia_ there is a group whose name, the _century_, exactly
translates the name of the Teutonic group; and, as Mr. Freeman says, it
is difficult to believe that the Roman _century_ did not at the outset
in some way correspond to the Teutonic _hundred_ as a stage in political
organization. But both these terms, as we know them in history, are
survivals from some prehistoric state of things; and whether they were
originally applied to a hundred of houses, or of families, or of
warriors, we do not know.[8] M. Geffroy, in his interesting essay on the
Germania of Tacitus, suggests that the term _canton_ may have a similar
origin.[9] The outlines of these primitive groups are, however, more
obscure than those of the more primitive mark, because in most cases
they have been either crossed and effaced or at any rate diminished in
importance by the more highly compounded groups which came next in order
of formation.
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