252 UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION 



of savagery. The family was the punaluan, in which, 

 under the laws of the gens, half brothers and sisters 

 were lawfully living in wedlock. Polygamy and 

 polyandry were universal. These were the customs, 

 and considered by them perfectly innocent and moral. 

 They undoubtedly had been the legal and moral cus- 

 toms, throughout the -world, at the same stage of social 

 development, viz. : the lowest, and the middle stage of 

 savagery. 



The gens at that stage of development was the unit 

 of society, the same as the family is the unit in civiliza- 

 tion now. The gens consisted of a supposed female 

 ancestry and her children, together with the children of 

 her daughters, and of her female descendants, through 

 females in perpetuity. The geneology was traced through 

 the mothers, while ours at the present time, is through 

 the fathers. The law of marriage was, that it could not 

 occur between members of the same gens, but that each 

 male, or female, could marry any member of another 

 gens. The children, both male and female, belonged to 

 the gens of the mother. But if the same father begat 

 children by different wives, of different gens, then these 

 children could legally, and morally, marry each other, 

 because they belonged to different gentes. 



The immorality consisted in violating the law of the 

 gens, not in complying with the law, whatever that 

 was. Our ancestors, when they were passing through 

 the same status of savagery, prior to historical time, 

 had the same marriage rites under the same form of 

 the gens. So the missionaries in so strongly condemn- 

 ing what they called the great immorality of the 

 Fijiens, were really besmirching the character of their 

 own ancestors^ who practised the punaluan customs, in 

 their savage and barbaric status, and were as innocent 



