woman, the sons and daughters of a sister are reckoned as her own sons and daughters, and their children are her grandchildren. The collateral kinship is then confounded, at least in terminology, with kinship in a direct line. On the contrary, the sons and daughters of a woman's brother are only her nephews and nieces. How can we explain this familial confusion on one side, and this distinction on the other? It may probably be attributed to the habit of the Redskins to marry a lot of sisters at the same time. A woman counts her sister's children as her own, because the husband of that sister, whom we should call her brother-in-law, is virtually her husband also. Inversely, for a man, his brother's children, or his fraternal nieces and nephews, are reckoned as his own children; their children are his grandsons or grand-daughters, whilst the children and grandchildren of his sister are only his nephews and nieces.[1] Following our previous line of reasoning, we are led to suppose that these denominations of kinship go back to a distant epoch, when brothers had their wives in common, but abstained from marrying their own sisters. This supposition is confirmed by the examination of the collateral ascending kinship. Thus, either in the case of a man or woman, the father's brother, or the paternal uncle, is reckoned as the father, and his sons and daughters are reckoned as brothers and sisters.
The sisters of the father, or of any person bearing the title of father, are called aunts. The children of these aunts are cousins. For a man, the kinship of uncle is restricted to the brothers of the mother, and the children of these uncles are cousins. The mother's sister, or the maternal aunt, is counted as a mother; her children are not nephews and nieces, but sons and daughters. All sisters, real or fictitious, are mutually mothers of all their children. The children of a man's brothers are not his nephews and nieces, but his sons and daughters; his sisters' children are his nephews and nieces,[2] probably because these names have been given at an epoch when the brothers married groups of sisters in common, but not their own sisters.
