While Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines property as 'something regarded as being possessed by, or at the disposal of, a person or group of persons species or class,' (p. 1078) this definition hardly holds the connotations so emphatically discussed by the anthropologist Morgan. To Morgan, 'property has been so immense...so diversified its uses so expanding...that it has become...an unmanageable power.' (p.561) Why has it become such an unmanageable power? Morgan answers this question with the simple answer that it is due to the linear evolution of the social institution of pr…