OF ARTS AND SCIENCES: FEBRUARY 11, 1868. 467 



XV. All the brothers and sisters of ray grandfather, and all the 

 brothers and sisters of my grandmother, are my grandparents. Rea- 

 son : They are the fathers and mothers of my father and mother. 



Every blood-relationship recognized under the Malayan system is 

 thus explained from the nature of descents, and is seen to be the one 

 actually existing, as near as the parentage of the individual could be 

 known, with the exception of a limited number, which seem to have 

 originated in the analogies of the system. The system, therefore, 

 follows the streams of the blood, instead of thwarting or diverting its 

 currents. It appears to have originated in the intermarriage or cohab- 

 itation of brothers and sisters in a communal family, the assumption of 

 which, as a custom, is necessary to explain its origin from the nature 

 of descents. When the Hawaiian custom, which finds its type in the 

 intermarriage of brothers and sisters, intervened, it brought into the 

 communal family other males and females ; but it must have left the 

 previous usage unaffected, otherwise several of the Malayan relation- 

 ships would have become untrue to the nature of descents, and 

 "changed, as we shall hereafter see, in the case of the Turanian and 

 Ganowanian systems. 



The origin of the several marriage relationships may be explained, 

 with more or less of certainty, upon the same principles. 



This solution of the origin of the Malayan system, although it rests, 

 aside from the Hawaiian custom, upon the assumed intermarriage of 

 brothers and sisters, is sufficiently probable in itself to deserve serious 

 attention. It reveals a state of society in the primitive ages, not con- 

 fined to the islands of the Pacific, with the evidence of its actual 

 existence still preserved in this system of relationship, which we shall 

 be reluctant to recognize as real, and yet toward which evidence from 

 other and independent sources has long been pointing. It finds man- 

 kind, during the period anterior to the Hawaiian custom, in a bar- 

 barism so profound that its lowest depths can scarcely be imagined. It 

 is partially shadowed forth by the fact, that neither the propensity to 

 pair, now so powerfully developed, nor marriage in its proper sense, 

 nor the family, except the communal, were known ; and, above all, that 

 the sacredness of the tie which binds brother and sister together, and 

 raises them above the temptations of animal passion, had not then 

 dawned upon the barbarian mind. 



In the next place we are to submit a conjectural solution of the 



