e conclusions as to the evolution of the
family, conclusions which seem to entangle even the best authorities
in a mass of contradictions. I cannot think of a family group in
savagery with father, mother, sons, and daughters, all delightfully
known to each other, in terms which also belong to the civilised
family, and still less can I think of these terms being used to take
in the extended grouping of local kinships. One of our greatest
difficulties, indeed, is the indiscriminate use of kinship terms by
our descriptive authorities. We are never quite sure whether the
physical relationships included in them convey anything whatever to
the savage. If he knows of the physical fact, he does not use it
politically, for blood kinship as a political force is late, not
early, and the early tie was dependent upon quite other circumstances.
Over and over again it will be found stated by established authorities
that the family was the primal unit, the grouped families forming the
larger clan, the grouped clans forming the larger tribe. This is Sir
Henry Maine's famous formula, and it is the basis of his investigation
into early law and custom.[326] It is founded upon the false
conception of the family in early history, and upon a too narrow
interpretation of the stages of evolution. When we are dealing with
savage society, the terms family and tribe do not connote the same
institution as when we are dealing with higher forms of civilisation.
There is something roughly corresponding to these groupings in both
systems, but they do not actually equate. When we pass to the Semitic
and the Aryan-speaking peoples, both the family and tribe have assumed
a definite place in the polity of the races which is not to be found
outside these peoples.

So strongly has the family impressed itself upon the thought of the
age that students of man in his earliest ages are found stating that
"the family is the most ancient and the most sacred of human
institutions."[327] This proposition, however, is not only denied by
other authorities, as, for instance, Mr. Jevons, who affirms that "the
family is a comparatively late institution in the history of
society,"[328] but it rests upon the merely analytical basis of
research, separated entirely from those facts of man's history which
are discoverable by the means just now suggested. One is, of course,
quite prepared to find the family among civilisations older than the
Indo-European, and yet to find that