After the comrades provided Engels’ text "History and Language of the Germans", it was considered to expand the first part of the work.

Frederick Engels recalls the presence of man in Europe since the period between the last two ice ages: "After the second ice age, with the climate becoming progressively milder, man appears throughout Europe, in North Africa and Asia Minor, as far as India. The tools of that era indicate a very low degree of civilization: very crude stone knives, axes or axes of pear-shaped stone, which were used without handles, scrapers for cleaning animal skins, drills, all of balenite: roughly the degree of development of the present natives of Australia. In none of the regions where they appeared, not even in India, are preserved human races that can be regarded as their prosecutors of present-day humanity".

In the caves of England, France, Switzerland, Belgium and southern Germany, the tools of these vanished men can still be found, but from a more recent period, more skillfully crafted and of different materials: "These men probably arrived from the northeast: their last remains today seem to be the Eskimos (...) These too, hitherto documented only north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, have disappeared from Europe. Just as the American Redskins were repelled, still in the past century, to the far north by a ruthless war of annihilation, so too it seems that in Europe the new race now appearing gradually repelled the Eskimos and finally exterminated them, without having merged with them.

"This new race compared with its predecessors was at a considerably higher level of civilization. It knew agriculture; it had domesticated animals (dog, horse, sheep, goat, pig, cattle). He knew pottery; he could spin and weave. His tools were still made of stone, but worked with great care and mostly polished (they are distinguished as Neolithic from those of earlier ages). Axes are immaneled and for the first time, therefore, useful for making wood; with this it becomes possible to hollow out tree trunks to make boats, on which it was possible to reach the British Isles".

Settled primitive peoples used hunting and fishing most for their livelihood, while agriculture was largely unknown except for what nature gave spontaneously: various herbages, fruits, and rare seeds. Later nomadic peoples, who dominated various settled populations, introduced pastoralism and animal husbandry to these dominated populations. In "Agrarian Production and the Forms of Land Ownership", Frederick Church describes this early stage of the introduction of pastoralism: "In the early stages of the development of pastoralism animals are allowed to graze freely on the vast plains and hills, except to take possession of them and their products when the need arises. The care required for breeding and rearing requires a relatively high degree of development, which is not always achieved before grain cultivation is reached".

To follow these flocks in their wanderings in search of pastures, in the plains during the winter, and in the mountains in the summer, induced populations to nomadism.

"Agriculture has a complementary character among pastoral peoples (...) struggles are fought for the acquisition of pasture, both among pastoralists and with hunters. Frequent migration does not allow wide utilization of agricultural land. Real cultivation of the land does not occur except by exception".

Having to transhumance herds in search of pasture required preferring animal species that were small and more productive and easier to move.

"Pastoralism was in its origin necessarily nomadic. The causes that cause the differentiation of occupying societies from herding societies are in evidence. In the former the horde prevails and in the latter the gens. The former is an economy in which what is purchased is immediately consumed; while the herding populations pass on the ownership of herds to heirs".

The prevalence of the gens over the horde contributes to the establishment of the family and facilitates its development with the replacement of patriarchy by matriarchy, and with the formation of aristocracies, determined in relation to the property accumulated by each family. In addition, cattle-breeding societies differ from occupationist ones in an initial division into classes, using prisoners of war reduced to the status of slaves.

Raising livestock is more profitable and less time-consuming than hunting. In idle times, herders are devoted to processing animal products to meet the needs of the family. It is therefore noted that in peoples who maintain a nomadic life, no remarkable economic-social transformations take place, for which population density, stable dwelling and division of labor are required. "Nomads do not progress, but neither do they grow old, and it is only with the introduction of agriculture that the common laws of human development have the upper hand over them".

In these peoples there is not internal trade but external trade, brought about by the need of the various gentile organizations to barter as much as they overabund. Nomads are not only initiators of external trade but also become intermediaries of trade due to their abundance of cargo animals and their migrations.

"In the agricultural state, family ties are strengthened, and while nomadic peoples are generally polygamous, agricultural peoples are monogamous. This is due to the necessity that arises in the early stage of the development of stable agriculture, namely, that families do not become very large and do not grow too fast vis-à-vis what was being produced from the land.

"The development of agriculture makes it necessary to organize the ownership and use of land and to protect and defend one and the other. Which causes the rise of an authority that is apt to accomplish such protection and that can, at the same time, dictate rules that guarantee the ownership and use of land and permit its succession among heirs or its alienation in favor of third parties. In this way from the horde of hunters and the tribe of nomads we come by agriculture to political life, to the state".

Engels explains how the Germans penetrated Central Europe through the plains that lie in the northern slope of the Carpathians and the mountainous region on the borders of Bohemia.

"The way of life of the Germans proves that they were not yet sedentary. They lived chiefly from farming, from cheese, milk and meat, less from grain; the main occupation of the men is hunting and the use of weapons. They practiced agriculture a little, but only marginally and in the most primitive way".

"But the Germans encountered by Caesar are far from being nomadic in the sense in which the horseman peoples of Asia are at present. For this the steppe is necessary, and the Germans lived in the virgin forest. But they were just as far from the level of sedentary peasant peoples".

Sixty years later Strabo says of them:

"From Asia they had brought knowledge of agriculture, as comparative linguistics proves. But it was an agriculture of semi-nomadic warrior tribes, moving across the forested plains of central Europe, which served as a means of fortune and a secondary source of life".

"A good century and a half after Caesar, Tacitus gives us his famous description of the Germans. Here things are already presented quite differently. The tribes have stabilized. One cannot yet speak of cities. The buildings still lack square stones and roof tiles; they are crudely made of rough logs".

About agriculture in the Roman Empire we added to the report a remark about the concentration of land ownership: "The defect of versatility of slaves and the continuous culture of the same product soon exhausts fertile land. Slave labor even becomes passive; hence the need for ever new fertile land. Hence the concentration of land ownership: the entire vast Roman Empire was owned by no more than 2,000 citizens. The latifundium became the princely regime of agricultural tenure; exploited with extensive cultivation it had a production that was not proportional to the increase in population, thus causing continual famines, which led landowners to prefer pastoralism to agriculture".

"Dispossession of the rural population and its removal from the land", thus titles a paragraph in =Capital’ in the chapter =Process of Capital Accumulation,’ large passages of which we quoted at the meeting.

"In Italy, where capitalist production develops earlier than in other countries, the dissolution of serfdom relations also takes place earlier than in other places. The emancipation of the serf makes him a proletarian who already finds new masters ready in the cities.

"When the world market revolution after the end of the 15th century broke the commercial dominance of northern Italy, a movement in the opposite direction began. The workers in the cities were thrown back into the countryside en masse and increased small-scale farming, performed on the example of horticulture, to an extraordinary extent.

"In England serfdom had actually disappeared toward the latter part of the 14th century. The overwhelming majority of the population consisted in those days, and even more so in the 15th century, of self-governing free peasants".

Marx continues, "Such a state of affairs, coupled with the development of the cities, characteristic of the 15th century, resulted in the achievement of a popular wealth, but one that excluded capitalist wealth.

"The revolution that laid the foundations of the capitalist mode of production had its prelude in the last third of the 15th century and the first decades of the 16th. A mass of banished proletarians was thrown into the labor market by the dissolution of feudal ties.

"The new nobility regarded money as the power of powers. Consequently, its watchword was to turn arable land into pasture".