590 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



and we find in Wales and Scotland numerous tales of giants and 

 spirits who ate their captives and drank their blood. 



Another custom mentioned by Strabo, that the ancient Irish con- 

 sumed the corpses of their fathers, can certainly not be credited to 

 the Celts, since it is well known what an important part the ancestor 

 cult plays among the Indo-Europeans. This custom goes back to 

 the belief of the savage, that with the blood he also takes in the soul 

 of the dead, and traces of the custom can be followed up even at the 

 present day. 



Wood-Martin relates that the still subsisting custom in Ireland 

 of taking food at a funeral in the presence of the dead is a later form 

 of an old custom of consuming the food after it was laid on the corpse, 

 with the object of acquiring certain qualities of the departed. It 

 may be considered as a remnant of the old barbarous custom of con- 

 suming the corpse itself. 



Schrader has shown that the family conception of the Indo-Euro- 

 peans in prehistoric times must have been entirely agnatic — the prin- 

 ciple of relationship by the father's side was carried through in the 

 common prehistoric time of the Indo-Europeans. "When in the Brit- 

 ish Isles traces of the matriarchate are discovered they must be as- 

 cribed to the pre-Celtic peoples. 



Zinnner has positively established the fact that among the Picts of 

 Scotland the matriarchate prevailed down to historic times. The 

 Picts are to be sure non-Indo-Europeans, but they were celticized : 

 they had absorbed numerous Gaelic elements at about 500 B. C. 

 from the Irish Gaels, 100 to 200 years later from the " Brythons," 

 and were gaelicized again in the first Christian centuries. 



In Wales traces of the matriarchate are found in the families of 

 the Mabinogion, and also as regards Ireland many clear proofs can 

 be adduced. 



Matriarchate among the Iberians in antiquity is well attested, and 

 Solinus relates that in Ireland it is the mother that offers to the new 

 born the first food on the point of the sword of her husband, with 

 the wish that he may die in no other way than in battle. On the 

 other hand, among the Indo-Europeans it is the father who gave the 

 child the first food, as is proved in India by the Grihya-Sutren of 

 the Apastamba and Hiranyakesin, 1 and which Speijer in Jatakarna 

 (p. 103 ff.) has shown to hold good also for the other Indo-European 

 peoples. 



F. A. Potter relates (Description of West-Meath, 1819) that all 

 married women call themselves by their maiden names, which is still 

 customary in Ulster. According to Wood-Martin, women retain in 

 many places their maiden names and follow more often the relatives 

 of their mothers than of their fathers. 



1 M. Mueller, Sacred Books of the East, xix, pp. 213, 281. 



