284 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



character, that no assertion of a common blood was 

 implied in fatherright, but that it was an artificial 

 organisation formed upon the analogy of the organisa- 

 tion of motherright which it supplanted. 



Even where kinship is reckoned through the father 

 then, as well as ^where it is reckoned through the 

 mother, the question of actual paternity is little re- 

 garded. Children have their own value apart from 

 the question whether they belong in blood to the stock, 

 provided they can legally be counted to it. That 

 value often increases rather than diminishes with the 

 rise of fatherright. The necessity of having issue to 

 carry on the property and the religious duties of the 

 family is supreme. It is no objection to a child's son- 

 ship that he has none of his legal father's blood in his 

 veins : he is legally his son and has the legal rights of 

 a son all the same, and even though the father may be 

 quite conscious that he had no share in begetting him. 

 The child's sufficient title is to have been born of the 

 father's legal wife. 



But though economic and religious needs may thus 

 foster indifference on the subject of paternity, this 

 carelessness could hardly have arisen at all events it 

 could not be so widely prevalent if the relation of a 

 father had been as well understood as the relation of a 

 mother to the offspring. The same ignorance which 

 appears to be involved in the stories of supernatural 

 birth and the practices correlative therewith, the same 

 ignorance which is exhibited in the stories of meta- 

 morphosis by death and new birth and in the belief 

 in metempsychosis and reincarnation, is thus stamped 

 upon the social organisation of the lower culture. 

 Nor does the transition from motherright to father-r 



