composed not of a man with wife and children, but of a wife with men and children—such family-forms being found not alone in societies of embryonic and of infantine types, but also in considerably advanced societies.
A further assumption is that descent has always and everywhere been in the male line. That it has from the earliest recorded times of those peoples with whom Sir Henry Maine deals, must be admitted; and it may be admitted that male descent occurs also among some rude peoples of other types, as the Kukis of India, the Belooches, the New-Zealanders, the Hottentots. It is by no means the rule, however, among the uncivilized. Mr, McLennan, who has pointed out the incongruity between this assumption and a great mass of evidence, shows that in all parts of the world descent in the female line prevails; and the abundant proofs given by him I might, were it needful, enforce by many others. This system is not limited to groups so little organized that they might be set aside as preinfantine (were that permissible); nor to groups that stand on a level with the patriarchal, or so-called infantine, societies in point of organization; but it occurs in groups, or rather nations, that have evolved complex structures. Ellis says that kinship was through females in the two higher ranks of the Tahitians; and Erskine says the like of the Tongans. It was so, according to Piedrahita, with the ancient Chibchas, who had made no insignificant strides in civilization. Among the Iroquois, again, "titles, as well as property, descended in the female line, and were hereditary in the tribe; the son could never succeed to his father's title of sachem, nor inherit even his tomahawk;" and these Iroquois had advanced far beyond the infantine stage—were governed by a representative assembly of fifty sachems, had a separate military organization, a separate ecclesiastical organization, definite laws, cultivated lands individually possessed, permanent fortified villages. So, too, in Africa, succession to rank and property follows the female line among the coast-negroes, inland-negroes, Congo people, etc., who have distinct industrial systems, four and five gradations in rank, settled agricultures, considerable commerce, towns in streets. How misleading is the limited observation of societies, is shown by Marsden's remark respecting the Sumatrans of the Batta district, that "the succession to the chiefships does not go, in the first instance, to the son of the deceased, but to the nephew by a sister;" and that "the same extraordinary rule, with respect to property in general, prevails also among the Malays of that part of the island:" the rule which he thus characterizes as "extraordinary" being really, among the uncivilized and little civilized, the ordinary rule.
Again, Sir Henry Maine postulates the existence of government from the beginning—patriarchal authority over wife, children, slaves, and all who are included in the primitive social group. But those who have read preceding chapters on "The Regulating System" and
