§12 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
The Matriarchate in Southern India, Africa, and North America. 
The Patriarchal Theory lasted barely fifty years. It had owed its revival, as 
we have seen, to two fresh branches of research, comparative jurisprudence and 
comparative philology, both stimulated directly by the results of European ad- 
ministration in Northern India. It owed its decline to the results of similar 
inquiries in other parts of the world, stimulated no less directly by other phases 
of the great colonising movement, which marks, above all other things, the cen- 
tury from 1760 to 1860. Here again a small number of examples stand out as 
the crucial instances. British administration in India had, of course, been extended 
over the non-Aryan south, as well as over the north; and in Travancore, and 
other parts of the Madras Presidency, British commissioners found themselves con- 
fronted with types of society which showed the profoundest disregard of the Patri- 
archal Theory. Like the Lycians of Herodotus, these perverse people‘ called them- 
selves after their mothers’ names’: they honoured their mother and neglected their 
father, in society and government, as well as in their homes; their administration, 
their law, and their whole mode of life rested on the assumption that it was the 
women, not the men, in whom reposed the continuity of the family and the 
authority to governthe State. Here was a parecbasis, a‘ perverted type’ of society, 
worthy of Aristotle himself. It isa type which, as a matter of fact, is widely 
distributed in Southern and South-eastern Asia, and had been repeatedly 
described by travellers from the days of Tavernier (in Borneo) and Laval (in the 
Maldive Islands), if not earlier still. It existed also in the New World, and 
Lafitau had already compared the Iroquois with the ancient Lycians. But it 
was Buchanan’s account of the Nairs of the Malabar Coast, published in 1807, 
which came at the ‘ psychological moment,’ and first attracted serious attention. 
At the other extremity of India, also, analogous customs were being recorded, 
about the same time, by Samuel Turner in Tibet, which might have given pause 
at the outset to the speculators who hoped to base general conclusions on any- 
thing so special and peculiar as the customs of Aryan India. 
Similar evidence came pouring in during the generation which followed; 
partly, it is true, as the result of systematic search among older travellers, but 
mainly through the intense exploitation of large parts of the world by European 
traders and colonists. Conspicuous instances are the Negro societies of Western 
and Equatorial Africa, first popularised by the republication of William Bosman’s 
‘Guinea’ (1700), in Pinkerton’s ‘General Collection of Voyages and Travels’ 
(London, 1808, &c.), and by Proyart’s ‘ Histoire de Loango’ (1776), which also 
reached the English public in the same invaluable collection. But it was from 
the south that the new African material came most copiously, in proportion as 
the activity of explorers, missionaries, and colonists was greater. Thunberg’s 
account of the Bechuanas ! takes the lead here ; but for English thought the prin- 
cipal authorities are, of course, John Mackenzie* and David Livingstone.° 
It was not to be expected that America, which had made such remarkable 
contributions to the study of Man in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
should fall behind in the nineteenth, when its vast resources of mankind, as of 
Nature’s gifts, were being realised at last. From Hunter,* Gallatin,’ and 
Schooleraft,® in the twenties, to Lewis Morgan’ in 1865, there was hardly a 
traveller ‘out West’ who did not bring back some fresh example of society 
destructive of the Patriarchal Theory. 
As often happens in such cases, more than one survey of the evidence was in 
1 Pinkerton, vol. xvi. 
2 John Mackenzie, Ten Year's North of the Orange River (1859-69). Edinburgh, 1871. 
3 David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries 
(1858-64). London, 1865. 
4 Hunter, Manners and Customs of several Indian Tribes located West of the 
Mississippi. Philadelphia, 1823. 
5 Gallatin, Archéologia Americana. Philadelphia (from 1820 onwards). 
® Schoolcraft, Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley (New York, 
(1825) ; Notes on the Iroqwis (1846). 
7 Lewis H. Morgan, Proc. Am. Acad. Arts and Sciences, vii. 1865-8. 
