OF THE HUMAN FAMILY. 43 



The first collateral line, male, gives the following series : Brother, nepliew, and 

 nephew-grandson. The second: Paternal uncle, double-birth brotlier, double- 

 birth nephew, and double-birth nephew-grandson. The same peculiarity runs 

 through the other branches of this line, and also through the several branches 

 of the third and more remote collateral lines. Thus, in the third we have for the 

 series, grandfather, double-birth uncle, triple-birth brother, trifle-birth nephew, 

 and triple-birth nephew-grandson. A reference to the Table will show that the 

 same form of designation runs through the entire system. It will be observed that 

 in the Russian, as in the Polish, the terms for brother and sister are applied to first, 

 second, third and fourth cousins, male and female : thus the double-birth brother 

 is in the second collateral line, the triple in the third, and the quadruple in the 

 fourth. The son of each of these collateral brothers is a nephew of Ego, and the 

 son of each of these nephews is his nephew-grandson of a certain birth. This 

 realizes, in part, the classification of consanguinci which is found in the Hindi and 

 Bengali, and in other forms in the several dialects of the Gaura language. It 

 appears to be its object to bring collateral kindred within the near degrees of rela- 

 tionship, instead of describing them as persons; leaving the relationship to be 

 implied from the force of the description. The same idea repeats itself in calling 

 a grandfather's brother a grandfather, which he is not, instead of great-uncle, or 

 describing him as grandfather's brother. 



Special features, such as these, incorporated in a system of relationship, are of 

 great value for ethnological purposes. Where not essentially foreign to the system 

 they may be explained as deviations from uniformity which sprang up fortuitously 

 in a particular branch of a great family of nations, after which they were trans- 

 mitted with the blood to the subdivisions of such branch ; or, if fundamentally 

 different from the original system of the family, they may have resulted from a 

 combination of two radically distinct forms, and, therefore, indicate a mixture of 

 the blood of two peoples belonging to different families. These special features 

 of a system, when as marked as in the Polish and the Russian, have a history 

 capable of interpretation which reaches far back into the past. They are worthy 

 of investigation for the possible information they may yield upon the question of 

 the blood affinities of nations which concur in their possession, however widely 

 separated they may be from each other. If the divergent element is unexplainable 

 as a development from the materials of the common system of the family, its foreign 

 origin, through mixture of blood, will become a strong presumption. The peculiar 

 features of the Sclavonic system cannot be explained as arising by natural growth 

 out of a form originally descriptive. There is a distinct element of classification 

 of kindred applied to collaterals which does not seem to spring by logical develop- 

 ment from the ideas that underlie the common system of the Aryan family. It 

 falls far below the comprehensive method of classification which distinguishes the 

 Turanian system; but it finds its counterpart to some extent, as before stated, in 

 the Hindi and Bengali forms, which have been placed in the Turanian connection. 



5. Lithuanian. The Lithuanian system of relationship is not fully extended in 

 the Table. So much of it only is given as could be drawn from the lexicon or 

 vocabulary of the dialect. It is therefore limited to the special terms. The 



