UNITY AND CONTINUITY. 315 



One of the most remarkable of the links which bind 

 together all nations of men as of one blood, is the 

 method in which they reckon consanguinity and 

 descent. The truth is, that some of the rudest peoples 

 have more systematic methods of this kind than those 

 known to ourselves, and that these primitive products 

 of human thought and experience have been handed 

 down through the channels of descent from the most 

 remote times. Morgan,* in his elaborate work on the 

 " Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human 

 Family," has shown that two distinct systems now 

 exist the Descriptive, in which a few terms express- 

 ing primary relationships are combined so as to 

 express the more divergent and distant connections 

 till they disappear in nameless divergences ; and the 

 Classificatory, in which the divergent relationships 

 are brought back to the main line by classifying them 

 with the relationships most resembling them, as when 

 my brothers' sons, are called my sons instead of being, 

 as in the other mode, my nephews. 



Between these two methods men have from a very 

 early age been divided. The Indo-European or Aryan 

 nations, the Semitic nations, and that portion of the 

 Turanian stock known as the Uralian, use the descrip- 

 tive mode. The whole of the peoples of Eastern Asia, 

 Polynesia, and America, use the classificatory mode ; 

 and as this is the mode of the most stationary and 

 unprogressive peoples, it is probable that it is the 

 primitive method, from which the more advanced 

 * " Smithsonian Contributions," vol. xvii. 



