OF THE UUMAN FAMILY. 501 



encourage an inference of accidental invention, where two or more of these forms 

 were found to be in radical agreement; but since the number is but two, the 

 descriptive and the classificatory, of the first of which there is no subordinate form, 

 and of the last but one principal and two subordinate forms, this hypothesis is seen 

 to rest upon a weak foundation. There is, however, a much greater difficulty than 

 this, and it is found in the elaborate and complicated structure of the system. 

 The improbability of an accidental invention of the same system in disconnected 

 areas increases with the addition of each special feature, from the first to the last ; 

 becoming finally an impossibility. A system of consanguinity which, upon analy- 

 sis, yields upwards of twenty distinct particulars must be acknowledged to stand 

 entirely beyond the possibility of accidental invention. This hypothesis, therefore, 

 like the preceding one, must be dismissed as untenable. 



3. By spontaneous growth in disconnected areas under the influence of sugges- 

 tions springing from similar wants in similar conditions of society. 



This method of accounting for the origin of the classificatory system, by repeated 

 reproduction, possesses both plausibility and force. It suggests itself at once as a 

 presumption, and as the readiest solution of its origin independently in difierent 

 families of mankind. From the commencement of this research it has seemed to 

 the author to be the essential and the only difficulty that stood in the pathway 

 between this extraordinary system of relationship and the testimony it might 

 deliver, unincumbered by this objection, upon ethnological questions. It has, 

 therefore, been made a subject of not less careful study and reflection than the 

 system itself. Not until after a patient analysis and comparison of its several 

 forms, upon the extended scale in which they are given in the Tables, and not until 

 after a careful consideration of the functions of the system, as a domestic institu- 

 tion, and of the evidence of its mode of propagation from age to age, did these 

 doubts finally give way, and the insufficiency of this hypothesis to account for the 

 origin of the system many times over, or even a second time, become fully apparent. 

 Every attempt to account for the simultaneous or concurrent production of the 

 system in the several subdivisions of a particular family is met with insuperable 

 difficulties, and these are equally great with respect to its production independently 

 in diff"erent families. Whether the reasons herein assigned against the sufficiency 

 of this hypothesis are convincing or otherwise is neither material nor final, since 

 the Tables remain to declare for themselves. They stand unaff"ected by argument 

 or inference, and hold their own facts and testimony uninfluenced by the theories 

 or speculations of particular persons. 



The discussion of this hypothesis resolves itself into two distinct arguments. 

 The first proceeds upon the rejection of the proposed solution of the origin of the 

 system from the nature of descents, as they would exist in virtue of the series of 

 assumed customs and institutions {sujyra, 480), tlius leaving the system to have 

 sprung from unknown causes. And the second, accepting this solution as pro- 

 bable and recognizing the said series as having actually existed, meets the final 

 question whether or not it originated in disconnected areas, through the rise and 

 development independently of the same series of customs and institutions. 



Under the first branch the system is unexplainable and fortuitous in its origin ; 



