ent
was formerly reckoned in Australia in the female line, and the usage
survives in some regions. Howitt, in a letter to Professor Tylor,
reports of the tribes near Maryborough, Queensland:

When a man marries a woman from a distant locality, he goes to
her tribelet and identifies himself with her people. This is
a rule with very few exceptions. Of course, I speak of them
as they were in their wild state. He becomes a part of, and
one of, the family. In the event of a war expedition, the
daughter's husband acts as a blood-relation, and will fight
and kill his own blood-relations, if blows are struck by his
wife's relations. I have seen a father and son fighting under
these circumstances, and the son would most certainly have
killed the father, if others had not interfered.[100]

In Australia there is also a very sharp social expression of the fact
of sex in the division of the group into male and female classes in
addition to the division into clans.[101] In the Malay Archipelago the
same system is found.

Among the Padang Malays the child always belongs to its
mother's _suku_, and all blood-relationship is reckoned
through the wife as the real transmitter of the family, the
husband being only a stranger. For this reason his heirs are
not his own children, but the children of his sister, his
brothers, and other uterine relations; children are the
natural heirs of their mother only.... We may assume that,
wherever exogamy is now found coexisting with inheritance
through the father (as among Rejangs and Bataks, the people
of Nias and Timor, or the Alfurs of Ceram and Buru), this was
formerly through the mother; and that the other system has
grown up out of dislike to the inconveniences arising from the
insecure and dependent condition of the husband in the wife's
family.[102]

In Africa descent through females is the rule, with exceptions. The
practice of the Wamoima, where the son of the sister is preferred in
legacies, because "a man's own son is only the son of his wife," is
typical.[103] Battel reported that the state of Loango was ruled by
four princes, the sons of the former king's sister, since the own sons
of the king never succeeded.[104]

Traces of this system are found in China and Japan, and it is still in
full force in parts of India. Among the Kasias of northeast India the
husband resides in the house of