Wolves. As a rule, also, descent is traced from the mother, not from the father."[1]
The analogy of the North American Indian custom is therefore with that of the Australians in making clanship on the female side a bar to marriage, but if we go down further south into Central America, the reverse custom, as in China, makes its appearance. Diego de Lauda says of the people of Yucatan, that no one took a wife of his name, on the father's side, for this was a very vile thing among them; but they might marry cousins german on the mother's side.[2] Further south, below the Isthmus, both the clanship and the prohibition reappear on the female side. Bernau says that among the Arrawaks of British Guiana, "Caste is derived from the mother, and children are allowed to marry into their father's family, but not into that of their mother."[3] Lastly, Father Martin Dobrizhoffer says that the Guaranis avoided, as highly criminal, marriage with the most distant relatives, and, speaking of the Abipones, he makes the following statement:—"Though the paternal indulgence of the Roman Pontiffs makes the first and second degrees of relationship alone a bar to the marriage of the Indians, yet the Abipones, instructed by nature and the example of their ancestors, abhor the very thought of marrying any one related to them by the most distant tie of relationship. Long experience has convinced me, that the respect to consanguinity, by which they are deterred from marrying into their own families, is implanted by nature in the minds of most of the people of Paraguay," etc.[4]
In the study of this remarkable series of restrictions, it has to be borne in mind that their various, anomalous, and inconsistent forms may be connected with interfering causes, and this one in particular, that the especial means of tracing kindred is by a system of surnames, clan-names, totems, etc. This system is necessarily one-sided, and though it will keep up the record of descent either on the male or female side perfectly and for ever, it cannot record both at once. In practice, the races of the world
