74 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



savagery. To them the cultivation of the soil is not 

 unknown ; and their religious rites attest the import- 

 ance of agriculture in their economy. Probably in 

 earlier times the husband had no possessory interest in 

 the fields, and the crops which he is exhorted in the 

 marriage ritual to tend and gather belonged to his wife 

 and her family. Even yet the little gardens imme- 

 diately about the village are owned and tended 

 exclusively by the women and descend from daughter 

 to daughter. But modern influences have reached 

 Zuni ; a man is now capable of owning something 

 more than his horses and donkeys and his weapons 

 and personal adornments. If he be at marriage 

 possessed of any land its produce is brought into the 

 common stock for the support of the home ; and on the 

 death of the owner his children, boys and girls, share 

 his property. Motherright has begun its inevitable 

 decay. 1 



The Hopis are more conservative. With them the 

 women still own not only merely the houses but the 

 crops, the sheep and the peach-orchards, everything in 

 fact relating to the economy of the household but the 

 beasts of burden. This is an interesting testimony to 

 the antiquity of the custom. The horses and donkeys 

 were unknown before the coming of the white man. 

 They are a new acquisition, and their service lightens 

 the labour that falls upon the men. Peaches, wheat 

 and sheep were also the gifts of the Spanish mission- 

 aries. But the Pueblo peoples were already tillers of 

 the soil when the missionaries came among them. 

 To this day they plant and irrigate, they hoe and 

 gather their peach-trees and crops much as they 

 1 Gushing, Id, xiii. 365 ; Mrs. Stevenson, Id. xxiii. 290. 



