BIOLOGY OF MAN 1189 



these conspicuously in the domestic and the agricultural life; as 

 well as educator of her children, and counsellor of the tribe, as 

 markedly among Red Indian tribes, so far even to this day. Among 

 other survivals, the matrilinear family system of the Nayars of 

 S.W. India is conspicuously associated with a high status of woman, 

 and a good level of civilisation ; while its antiquity, and that in high 

 esteem, is further confirmed by the traditions of various ancient 

 civilisations and religions. 



The later rise of the patrilinear system, and its spread as a social 

 institution, has been clearly associated with a different theory of the 

 role of the sexes. For here the dominant importance is given to the 

 father, whose all-important seed is sown in the woman's field: a 

 conception which goes naturally with the subordination of woman 

 to man, and must have greatly helped to justify it, even in her own 

 eyes. It is next of interest to note that the advancing status of 

 woman, on the political, legal and economic levels, as well as on that 

 of education, is broadly contemporaneous with the rise and diffusion 

 of our present knowledge of the biological facts of parentage and of 

 heredity, by which the sexes are now understood as fully comple- 

 mental; thus correcting the excess of each of the two preceding 

 theories, by combining the element of truth in each, and bringing 

 these towards clearness. The element of political, economic and 

 other crudeness in the initial conception of the organic and psychic 

 "equality" of the sexes — though useful towards removing legal and 

 political disabilities — is now being increasingly replaced by the 

 comprehension of their complemental qualities, with respective 

 predominance of each sex in its own functional ways, organic and 

 psychic, ethical and social, as already outHned in our survey. 

 And is not the above a good example of the broad parallelism and 

 contemporaneity of ways of social life and biological doctrines ? 



SEX AND ITS SOCIAL CONTROL —In this movement of 

 science, the biological study of the normal evolution of sex throughout 

 nature and in man, more or less as we have outlined in a previous 

 chapter, remains fundamental. Yet for adequate understanding of 

 our human conditions and our contemporary situation there have also 

 been needed all the labours of the medical and psychiatric patholo- 

 gists; and especially those of the Freudian schools. Their searching 

 analyses and ruthless unveilings of sex-evils throughout all their 

 intricacies, have afforded social diagnoses not a little disquieting to 

 all our past and current conventions, indeed, demonstrating the 

 disastrous insufficiency of these. With this a vast and increasing 

 reading public is now familiar; for its weaker members only too 

 much so ; but on all sides is also coming clearly into view the need of 

 social hygiene, and this with many endeavours. At simplest those 

 of preventive medicine, but next onwards, towards nothing short 



