6 SYSTEMS OF CONSANGUINITY AND AFFINITY 



the former might be filled out, according to its design, with the system of rela- 

 tionship of the people among whom they were respectively established ; and that 

 such explanations might be given as would be necessary to its interpretation. This 

 class of men possess peculiar qualifications for linguistic and ethnological researches ; 

 and, more than this, they reside among the nations whose systems of consanguinity 

 were relatively of the most importance for the purpose in hand. The tables Avill 

 show how admirably they performed the task. 



They were also sent to the diplomatic and consular representatives of the United 

 States in foreign countries, through whom another, and much larger, portion of 

 the human family was reached. By their instrumentality, chiefly, the system of 

 the Aryan family was procured. A serious difficulty, however, was met in this 

 direction, in a difference of language, which the official agents of the government 

 were unable, in many cases, to surmount. In Europe and Asia the number of 

 schedules obtained through them, in a completely executed form, was even larger 

 than would reasonably have been expected ; while in Africa, in South America, 

 and in Mexico and Central America the failure was nearly complete. 



To supply these deficiencies an attempt was made to reach the English missions 

 *!! the Eastern Archipelago and in Polynesia ; and also Spanish America through 

 the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy of those countries ; but the efforts proved 

 unsuccessful. 



The foregoing are the principal, but not the exclusive, sources from which the 

 materials contained in the tables were derived. 



A large number of schedules, when returned, were found to be imperfectly filled 

 out. Misapprehension of the nature and object of the investigation was the prin- 

 cipal cause. The most usual form of mistake was the translation of the questions 

 into the native language, which simply reproduced the questions and left them 

 unanswered. A person unacquainted with the details of his own system of rela- 

 tionship might be misled by the form of each question which describes a person, 

 and not at once perceive that the true answer should give the relationship sustained 

 by this person to Ego. As our own system is descriptive essentially, a correct 

 answer to most of the questions would describe a person very much in the form of 

 the question itself, if the system of the nation was descriptive. But, on the con- 

 trary, if it was classificatory, such answers would not only be incorrect in fact, but 

 would fail to show the true system. The utmost care was taken to guard against 

 this misapprehension, but, notwithstanding, the system of several important nations, 

 thus imperfectly procured, was useless from the difficulty, not to say impossibility, 

 of repeating the attempt in remote parts of the earth, where it required two years, 

 and sometimes three, for a schedule to be received and returned. In some cases, 

 where the correspondent was even as accessible as India, it required that length of 

 time, and the exchange of several letters, to correct and perfect the details of a single 

 schedule. Every system of relationship is intrinsically difficult until it has been 

 carefully studied. The classificatory form is complicated in addition to being diffi- 

 cult, and totally unlike our own. It is easy, therefore, to perceive that when a 

 person was requested to Avork out, in detail, the system of a foreign people he would 

 find it necessary, in the first instance, to master his own, and after that to meet 



