i62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nomena. Some of the most instructive of these are too new to have 

 yet found their way into our treatises on early institutions ; they are 

 accounts lately published by Dutch officials among the non-Islamized 

 clans of Sumatra and Java. G. A. Wilken, " Over de Verwantschap 

 en het Huwelijks en Erfrecht bij de Volken van den Indischen Archi- 

 pel," summarizes the account put on record by Van Ilasselt as to the 

 life of the Malays of the Padang Highlands of Mid- Sumatra, who are 

 known to represent an early Malay population. Among these people 

 not only kinship but habitation follows absolutely the female line, so 

 that the numerous dwellers in one great house are all connected by 

 descent from one mother, one generation above another, children, then 

 mothers and maternal uncles and aunts, then grandmothers and ma- 

 ternal great-uncles and great-aunts, etc. There are in each district 

 several sxiliu or mother-clans, between persons born in which marriage 

 is forbidden. Here, then, appear the two well-known rules of female 

 descent and exogamy, but now Ave come into view of the remarkable 

 state of society, that, though marriage exists, it does not form the 

 household. The woman remains in the maternal house she was born 

 in, and the man remains in his ; his position is that of an authorized 

 visitor ; if he will, he may come over and help her in the rice-field, 

 but he need not ; over the children he has no control whatever, and 

 were he to presume to order or chastise them, their natural guardian, 

 the mother's brother {mamak), would resent it as an affront. The law 

 of female descent and its connected rules have as yet been mostly 

 studied among the native Americans and Australians, where they have 

 evidently undergone much modification. Thus, one hundred and fifty 

 years ago, Father Lafitau mentions that the husband and wife, while 

 in fact moving into one another's hut, or setting up a new one, still 

 kept up the matriarchal idea by the fiction that neither he nor she 

 quitted their own maternal house. But in the Sumatra district just 

 referred to, the matriarchal system may still be seen in actual exist- 

 ence, in a most extreme and probably early form. If, led by such 

 new evidence, we look at the map of the world from this point of 

 view, there discloses itself a remarkable fact of social geography. It 

 is seen that matriarchal exogamous society, that is, society with female 

 descent and prohibition of marriage within the clan, does not crop up 

 here and there, as if it were an isolated invention, but characterizes a 

 whole vast region of the world. If the Malay district be taken as a 

 center, the system of intermarrying mother-clans may be followed 

 westward into Asia, among the Garos and other hill tribes of India. 

 Eastward from the Indian Archipelago it pervades the Melanesian 

 Islands, with remains in Polynesia ; it prevails widely in Australia, 

 and stretches north and south in the Americas. This immense district 

 represents an area of lower culture, where matriarchalism has only in 

 places yielded to the patriarchal system, which develops with the idea 

 of property, and which, in the other and more civilized half of the 



