dwellings of the American Indians. The houses
are gay in appearance, and are adorned with carved and coloured
woodwork. One dwelling will contain as many as a hundred people, who
form a _sa-mandei_, or mother-hood. Again we find the family
consisting of the house-mother and her descendants in the female
line--sons and daughters, and the daughters' children. McGee thus
describes these maternal households--[83]

[83] "The Beginning of Marriage," _American Anthropologist_,
Vol. IX, p. 376.

"If the visitor, mounting the ladder steps, looks in at one
of the doors of the separate dwellings, he may see seated
beyond the family hearth the mother and her children, eating
the midday meal, and very likely the father, who may have
been doing a turn of work in his wife's rice-plot. If he is
a kindly husband, he is there much as a friendly visitor,
but his real home remains in the house in which he was
born."

The husband has no permanent residence in the woman's house, and at
dusk each evening the men may be seen walking across the village to
join their wives and families. The father has no rights over his
children, who belong wholly to the wife's _suku_, or clan. But this in
no way implies that the father is unknown, for monogamy is the rule;
as is usual the question is one rather of social right than of
relationship. The maternal uncle is the male head of the house, and
exercises under the mother the duties of a father to the children. The
brother of the eldest grandmother is the male head of the family
settlement and the clan consists of a number of these families. It
would seem that these male rulers act as the agents of the female
members, whose authority is great. This power is dependent on the
inheritance; as is the descent, so is the property, and its
transmission is arranged for the benefit of the maternal lineage. For
this reason daughters are preferred rather than sons.

This account of the Padang Malays may be supplemented by the Jesuit
missionary De Mailla's description of the maternal marriage in the
Island of Formosa.[84] Speaking of this marriage, McGee says: "If it
had received the notice it deserves, it might long ago have placed the
study of maternal institutions on a sounder basis."

[84] _Lettres edefiantes et curieux_, Vol. XVIII, p. 441,
copied in Dunhalde, _Description de la Clune_, Vol. I, p.
166, and cited by McGee.

"The Formosan y