LAWS OF DESCENT.
Afatriarchal System—With rare exceptions the white race have from the earliest historic times traced relationship principally through the father's line. His name is borne and property descends through him. Even where, as in Spain, the mother as well as the father transmits her family name to the children, that of the father has the pre-eminence. Herodotus mentioned it as a remarkable, and indeed 'unparalleled, custom of the Lycians that they traced descent through the mother's line only. Later observation has discovered that this prevails extensively in quite diverse races, especially among the Australians, Americans, and Malay ans. By their laws a man must seek his wife in some other clan than his own, and the children born to the'pair belong not to the clan of the father, but to that of the mother. They bear the name of her family, are subject only to its laws, and if slain the duty of blood-revenge devolves upon the mother's kindred, not, as a rule, ou the father or his clan. Theoretically, they arc not related to him, and he has no right to punish them for dis obedience. The property and the hereditary honors belonging to the father do not pass to his sons, hut to his own brothers' or sisters' children. Hence he may find himself opposed to his own children in the conflicts of clans, and filial affection, as we understand it, has no place in such a scheme, any more than paternal authority.
This has been called the " matriarchal " system of the family as dis tinguished from the patriarchal. Though not often carried out to the full extent above depicted, it exists in principle very widely. In their specu
lations on the origin of what seems so unnatural a system of relationship ethnologists have usually attributed it to the uncertainty of paternity in savage communities. They have adduced it as a proof of the general promiscuity of unions in remote times, and have sought to show that at sonic epoch it was common throughout the world. More probably it was based on the plain facts that the mother brings the child into the world, nourishes and cares for it during infancy, and throughout life watches it with a stronger affection than the father. Hence it was nat ural for her to be regarded as more directly its parent than the father.
Patriarchal and Agnatic system of in which the relationship is counted through the father's side only, as it pre vailed in ancient Rome and in the patriarchal communities of the East, was also found in a few of the hunting tribes of North America. Its tendency was to place the woman on a lower plane. She was regarded as little better than a chattel and the slave of her husband. In the Roman agnatic family the woman was always in a state of tutelage, whether married or unmarried—in the latter case from her father, in the former from her husband. The American tribe in the area of the United States which has been said to show the most brutal treatment of wives is the Dakota, among whom there are few clans reckoning kinship through the females.