TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 905 



modifying roots or words by the insertion of a letter or syllable, somewhat as the 

 Dakota language inserts a pronoun within the verb-root itself, or as that remarkable 

 language, the Chocta, alters its verbs by insertions of a still more violent character. 

 Again, the distinction between the inclusive and exclusive pronoun we, according 

 as it means ' you and I ' or ' they and I,' &c. (the want of which is perhaps a 

 defect in English), is as familiar to the Maori as to the Ojibwa. Whether the 

 languages of the American tribes bo regarded as derived from Asia or as separate 

 developments, their long existence on the American continent seems unquestion- 

 able. Had they been the tongues of tribes come within a short time by Behring'a 

 Straits, we should have expected them to show clear connection with the tongues 

 of their kindred left behind in Asia, just as the Lapp in Europe, whose ancestors 

 have been separated for thousands of years from the ancestors of the Ostyak or the 

 Turk, still shows in his speech the traces of their remote kinship. The problem 

 how tribes so similar in physical type and culture as the Algonquins, Iroquois, 

 Sioux, and Athapascans, should adjoin one another, yet speaking languages so 

 separate, is only soluble by influences which have had a long period of time to 

 work in. 



The comparison of peoples according to their social framework of family and 

 tribe has been assuming more and more importance since it was brought forward 

 by Bachofen, McLennan, and Morgan. One of its broadest distinctions comes into 

 view within the Dominion of Canada. The Esquimaux are patriarchal, the father 

 being head of the family, and descent and inheritance following the male line. 

 But the Indian tribes further south are largely matriarchal, reckoning descent 

 not on the father's but the mother's side. In fact, it was through becoming an 

 adopted Iroquois that Morgan became aware of this system, so foreign to European 

 ideas, and which he supposed at first to be an isolated peculiarity. No less a 

 person than Herodotus had fallen into the same mistake over two thousand years 

 ago, when he thought the Lykians, in taking their names from their mothers, were 

 unlike all other men. It is now, however, an accepted matter of anthropology, 

 that in Herodotus' time nations of the civilised world had passed through this 

 matriarchal stage, as appears from the survivals of it retained in the midst of 

 their newer patriarchal institutions. For instance, among the Arabs to this day, 

 strongly patriarchal as their society is in most respects, there survives that 

 most matriarchal idea that one's nearest relative is not one's father but one's 

 maternal uncle ; he is bound to his sister's children by a ' closer and holier tie ' 

 than paternity, as Tacitus says of the same conception among the ancient Germans. 

 Obviously great interest attaches to any accounts of existing tribes which preserve 

 for us the explanation of such social phenomena. Some of the most instructive of 

 these are too new to have yet found their way into our treatises on early 

 institutions ; they are accounts lately published by Dutch officials among the non- 

 Islamised clans of Sumatra and Java. G. A. Wilken, ' Over de Verwantschap 

 en het Huwelijks en Erfrecht bij de Volken van den Indischen Archipel,' summa- 

 rises the account put on record by Van Hasselt as to the life of the Malays of the 

 Padang Highlands of Mid-Sumatra, who are known to represent an early Malay 

 population. Among these people not only kinship, but habitation follows absolutely 

 the female line, so that the numerous dwellers in one great house are all connected 

 by descent from one mother, one generation above another, children, then mothers 

 and maternal uncles and aunts, then grandmothers and maternal great-uncles and 

 great-aunts, &c. There are in each district several suku or mother-clans, between 

 persons born in which marriage is forbidden. Here then appear the two well- 

 known rules of female descent and exogamy, but now we come into view of the 

 remarkable state of society, that though marriage exists, it does not form the 

 household. The woman remains in the maternal house she was born in, and the man 

 remains in his ; his position is that of an authorised visitor ; if he will, he may 

 come over and help her in the rice-field, but he need not ; over the children he has 

 no control whatever, and were he to presume to order or chastise them, their 

 natural guardian, the mother's brother (ma?nak), would resent it as an affront. 

 The law of female descent and its connected rules have as yet been mostly studied 

 among the native Americans and Australians, where they have evidently under- 



