TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 841 



adhesions. Another custom, here called teknonymy, or naming the parent from the 

 child, prevails among more than thirty peoples ; as an example was mentioned the 

 name of Ra-mary, or Father of Mary, by which Moftat was generally known in. 

 Africa. This custom proves on examination to adhere closely to those of residence 

 and avoidance, the three occurring together among eleven peoples, that is, more 

 than six times as often as might be expected to happen by chance concurrence. 

 Their connection finds satisfactory explanation in the accounts given of the Cree 

 Indians of Canada, where the husband lives in his wife's house, but never speaks 

 to his parents-in-law till his first child is born ; this alters the whole situation, for 

 though the father is not a member of the family, his child is, and so confers on 

 him the status of ' Father of So-and-so,' which becomes his name, the whole being 

 then brought to a logical conclusion by the family ceasing to cut him. These 

 etiquettes of avoidance furnish an indication of the direction of change in social 

 habit among mankind ; there are eight peoples (for instance, the Zulus) where 

 residence is in the husband's family, with the accompanying avoidances, but at the 

 same time avoidance is kept up between the husband and the wife's family, indi- 

 cating that at a recent period he may have habitually lived with them. 



Tie method of tracing connection between customs is next applied, with the aid 

 of diagrams, to the two great divisions of human society, the matriarchal and the 

 patriarchal, or as the present writer prefers to call them, maternal and paternal 

 fiystems. In the maternal system descent and inheritance follow the mother's side, 

 and the guardian of the children is the maternal uncle, not the father, whose asser- 

 tion of parental rights belongs to the paternal system with descent and inheritance 

 on Ills side. The problem to be solved is, which of the two systems is the more 

 primitive, and to this the present method gives calculable answers, showing that 

 the drift of society has been from the maternal to the paternal system. Thus the 

 law by which the eldest son of an African chief inherits his stepmothers as wives 

 •belongs only to the stage where patriarchy is in force, which is consistent with this 

 bein;j the later system ; had it been the earlier system the custom would have 

 survived into the midst of matriarchy, where, in fact, it is not found. The custom 

 of the ' couvade,' where at the birth of the child the father is nursed and dieted 

 and otherwise behaves as though he were the mother, is evidence in the same direc- 

 tion. In the maternal stage of society, where the father has hardly any power or 

 position, this farcical proceeding is unknown, but where the paternal relation begins 

 to be more developed, we find it asserted among twenty peoples by the ceremony of 

 couv.ide, which even lasts on, in eight cases, into the full paternal system, being 

 only just extinct in Europe, where it lingered till the end of last century in the 

 Pyrenees. These several customs are so stratified as to demonstrate that Bachofen, 

 McLennan, Bastian, Morgan, Lubbock, Giraud-Teulon, Wilken, Fison, Howitt, 

 Lipport, Post, have judged rightly, from the evidence before them, in taking the 

 matriarchal system as the earlier, from which the patriarchal gradually arose. 



The paper continues with the argument that a chief underlying cause of both 

 systeoDS is still traceable in society. A diagram showing the classification of peoples 

 according to residence showed 65 peoples where the husband attaches himself per- 

 manently to the wife's family, 76 where such temporary residence is followed by 

 removal to a paternal home, and 151 where the paternal home is resorted to from, 

 the first. The changes brought about by the man's ceasing to be in the hands of his 

 wife's kinsmen, and becoming lord of a household of his own, represent, in fact, the 

 transformation of maternal into paternal society. Among the Pueblo Indians the 

 Hon. J. W. Powell, of the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington, has had the oppor- 

 tunity of watching this change brought about by the necessity of removal of 

 families, for agricultural purposes, from the parent settlement. 



By the method of adhesions, examination is next made of the practice of wife- 

 capture, recorded among about 100 peoples, as a hostile act, a recognised and con- 

 doned mode of marriage, or a mere formality. The two latter kinds (connubial 

 and formal) only come into existence with the paternal system. It is obvious that 

 this must be so, as the capture of a wife, even in pretence, necessarily involves 

 her passing into the husband's home and authority. The system of exogamy or 

 •^ marry ing-out,' in which husband and wife must belong to different clans, classes, 



