501 SYSTEMS OF CONSANGUINITY AND AFFINITY 



to the question in hand. If it is assumed, then, that the Turanian and Ganowanian 

 families were -created independently in Asia and America, would each, by impeia 

 tive necessity, have passed through the same experience, have developed the same 

 sequence of customs and institutions, and, as a final result, have produced the same 

 identical system of relationship 1 The statement of the proposition seems to work 

 its refutation on the ground of excessive improbability. It is evident that the 

 whole of this experience is but partially represented by the series of customs and 

 institutions named ; they are but the prominent landmarks of man's progress from 

 one stage of barbarism into another. The accidents, the struggles and the neces- 

 sities connected with the rise and adoption of each custom and institution must 

 remain unknown. If the tribal organization is taken as an illustration, it is neither 

 so obvious nor so simple that two people would originate it by natural suggestion, 

 or fall into it without design. It contains one refinement contravening the prin- 

 ciple upon which it may be supposed to rest as a natural organism ; namely, it 

 excludes a portion of the descendants of the supposed common ancestor, by the 

 limitation of descent to the male or to the female line, whereas nature would sug- 

 gest the inclusion of all. The series given involves great changes of social condi- 

 tion, and the intervention of long periods of time between the establishment of 

 each, during which the people, if the exclusive occupants of North and South 

 America, must have broken up into independent stocks, and scattered far asunder. 

 Besides this, the system must pass through two widely different and distinctly 

 marked stages, and change in the same precise direction in both. In its first stage 

 promiscuous intercourse inaugurates some system adapted to the state of society it 

 produced ; then comes the intermarriage or cohabitation of brothers and sisters, as 

 a partial check upon the former, with the introduction of the communal family. 

 This should be followed by the Hawaiian custom, bringing unrelated persons to 

 some extent into these communal families, and tending still further to check pro- 

 miscuous intercourse. Out of this experience arises the Malayan system of rela- 

 tionship, at once definite and complete. From this to the Ganowanian the transi- 

 tion is very great. It can only be reached by breaking up the cohabitation of 

 brothers and sisters, and whatever device was resorted to, it must leave unimpaired 

 existing institutions, except so far as they affected this particular practice. If the 

 tribal organization was then introduced, it is by no means a necessary inference 

 that two families, created independently upon different continents, would reform 

 tfrfiir respective systems of relationship in precisely the same manner, and after- 

 wards maintain them unchanged down to the present time. After this it must 

 further be supposed that each family, with their progressive experience, attained 

 to marriage between single pairs, and to the family state in a limited sense, 

 together with the practice of polygamy ; and also that they encountered the dis- 

 turbing influence of property so far as it existed and the question of its inheritance, 

 and yet maintained the system unbroken on both continents. These are but a few 

 of the difficulties in the way of explaining the simultaneous origin of the system in 

 two independent families of mankind. The present existence of this system of 

 relationship in the Turanian and Ganowanian families is a decisive argument, as 

 it seems to the author, against the theory of the separate creation of man upon the 



