ent structure of the Hawaiian system. It does not prove that
it could not have grown on the basis assumed by him....

If the opponents of Morgan dispute that the so-called consanguine family
is based on blood kinship, they are right, unless we wish to assign an
exceptional position to the Australian strata of generations. But if
they go further and declare that the subsequent restrictions of
inbreeding and the gentile order have arisen independently of
relationships, they commit a far greater mistake than Morgan. They block
their way to an understanding of subsequent organizations and force
themselves to all sorts of queer assumptions that at once appear as the
fruits of imagination, when compared with the actual institutions of
primitive peoples.

This explanation of the phases of development of family institutions
contradicts present day views on the matter. Since the scientific
investigations of the last decade have demonstrated beyond doubt that
the so-called patriarchal family was preceded by the matriarchal family,
it has become the custom to regard descent by females as a natural
institution belonging to the very first stages of development which is
explained by the modes of existence and thought among savages. Paternity
being a matter of speculation, maternity of actual observation, it is
supposed to follow that descent by females was always recognized. But
the development of the Australian systems of relationship shows that
this is not true, at least not in regard to Australians. The fact cannot
be disputed away, that we find female lineage among all those higher
developed tribes that have progressed to the formation of gentile
organizations, but male lineage among all those that have no gentile
organizations or where these are only in process of formation. Not a
single tribe has been discovered so far, where female lineage was not
combined with gentile organization, and I doubt that any will ever be
found."

[18] The History of Human Marriage, p. 28-29.

[19] Mutterrecht, p. xix.

[20] A Journey in Brazil. Boston and New York, 1886. Page 266.

[21] Bancroft, Native Races, I., 81.

[22] Ibidem, p. 584.

[23] Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 504.

CHAPTER III.

THE IROQUOIS GENS.

We now come to another discovery of Morgan that is at least as important
as the reconstruction of the primeval form of the family from the
systems of kinship. It is the proof that the sex organizations within
the trib