OF THE BUREAU OP ETHNOLOGY. LI 



own, particular hunting or fishing grounds. Sometimes a clan 

 will have a body of personal names to be given to its mem- 

 bers, which the clan claims as its own. Often a clan has a 

 particular place assigned to it as the site for its residence or 

 residences in the village group, and will occupy the same rel- 

 ative place in the village wherever the tribe may have a per- 

 manent or temporary residence Thus there are many rights 

 and duties which inhere in a clan and which may be said to 

 characterize it. But the eight characteristics included in the 

 above definition are those most commonly found. In the defi- 

 nition of the clan thus given, the tribe has been assumed to be 

 of very simple structure — as composed of a number of co-or- 

 dinate clans. But this simple structure is not universal — in fact, 

 a more complex structure is more common. Whenever a tribe 

 has a more complex structure, the characteristics above enu- 

 merated may not all inhere in every one of a number of co-or- 

 dinate groups, but may be distributed among groups of differ- 

 ent orders. It occasionally happens, also, that some of these 

 characteristics are not found in any group. Some of these 

 cases must next be considered. 



Let one of the most frequent cases be taken first. Suppose 

 that a tribe, becoming very large, divides in such a manner 

 that segments from every one of the clans separate from the 

 parent tribe and organize a new tribe with the same clans. 

 Thus the clans found in the parent tribe are represented in the 

 new tribe. Suppose that this fissiparous generation of tribes 

 continues until there are five, ten, or twenty tribes, every one 

 having the same clans as every other. Under such circum- 

 stances the same clan extends through many tribes, and any 

 one tribe has in its body-politic no more than a segment of any 

 clan ; but every tribe is composed of like segments. Now, such 

 a uniform division of tribes is rarely found. The division is 

 usually more irregular, from the fact that the departing body 

 which is organized into a new tribe usually takes with it seg- 

 ments of only a part of the clans; and as these divisions occur 

 from time to time, no two tribes are likely to have representa- 

 tives of exactly the same clans, and it may sometimes happen 

 that two tribes may he found in the same body of cognate 



