PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 613 
progress simultaneously. Bachofen was the first to publish,' and it is curious 
that his great book on ‘ Mother-right’ appeared in the very same year as Maine’s 
‘Ancient Law.’ Lubbock’s ‘ Prehistoric Times,’ in the next year, represents the 
same movement of thought in England in a popular shape, but almost inde- 
pendently. In America, Lewis Morgan, whom I have noted already as an able 
interpreter of Iroquois custom, followed up his detailed studies of Redskin law by 
a Smithsonian monograph in 1871 on ‘Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of 
the Human Family,’ and, in 1877, by his book on ‘ Ancient Society.’ Meanwhile 
Post had published his great work on the ‘ Evolution of Marriage ’? in 1875, and 
J. F. McLennan his first ‘Studies in Ancient History’ in 1876. It was the 
generation of Darwin and of the great philologists, as we have seen, and 
‘survivals’ were in the air: Dargan® pointed out traces of the Matriarchate 
in the law and custom of Germany, and Wilken‘ in those of early Arabia. 
The period of exploration, if I may so term it, closed on this aspect of the 
subject with Westermarck’s ‘ History of Human Marriage,’ which was published 
in London in 1891. 
Australian Evidence : Totemism and Classificatory Kinship. 
I have now mentioned India, South Africa, and North America, three 
principal fields of English-speaking enterprise during the nineteenth century, and 
have indicated the contribution of each to modern anthropology in its bearing 
on political science. Only Australia remains; and, though Australia’s task has 
been shared more particularly with North America, I shall be doing no injustice 
to Lewis Morgan or to McLennan if I couple with their names those of Fison 
and Howitt,° as the discoverers of classical instances of societies which observe 
neither paternal nor maternal obligations of kinship as we understand them, but 
have adopted those purely artificial systems of relationships which in moments 
of elation we explain as ‘ Totemic,’ or, in despair, describe as ‘ classificatory.’ 
Hermann Post: Comparative Jurisprudence. 
Our retrospect, therefore, of the last fifty years shows clearly once again 
how intimately European colonisation and anthropological discoveries have gone 
hand in hand: first to establish a ‘ Matriarchal Theory’ of society as a rival of the 
- Patriarchal; and then to confront both views alike with the practices and with 
the theories of ‘ Totemism.’ 
From the point of view of political science, all this mass of inquiries finds 
applications already in more departments than one; though it is probably still 
too early to appraise its influence adequately. The new Montesquieu has 
not yet arisen to interpret to us the ‘Spirit of the Laws.’ Most directly, 
erhaps, we can trace such influence in the ‘Comparative Jurisprudence’ of 
ermann Post, whose first work on the ‘Evolution of Marriage’ appeared, as 
we have seen, in 1875. Post’s general attitude is best seen in his ‘ Introduction 
to the Study of Ethnological Jurisprudence,’ which was published in 1886, 
and in his ‘ African Jurisprudence’ of 1887.° As the result of a survey of 
social organisations, considered as machinery in motion, Post points out very 
justly that it is useless to attempt to explain social phenomena on the basis of 
1 Bachofen, Das Mutter-recht. Stuttgart, 1861. 
? Hermann Post, Die Geschlechtsgenossenschaft der Urzeit und die Entstehung 
der Ehe. Oldenburg, 1875. 
3 Dargan, Mutter-recht und Raub-ehe und ihre Reste im Germanischen Recht und 
Leben. Breslau, 1883. 
* Wilken, Das Matriarchat bei den alten Arabern. Leipzig, 1884. 
> Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai. Melbourne and Sydney, 1880. 
®° Hermann Post, Linleitung in das Studiwm der ethnologischen Jurisprudenz 
(Oldenburg 1886); Afrikanische Jurisprudenz (1887). His position is, however, already 
clear in his first synthetic work, Der Ursprung des Rechts, 1876, as well as in his 
earlier book on Marriage. For a good summary of Post’s views see Th. Achelis, Die 
Entwickelung der modernen Ethnologie (Benin, 1889), p. 113-128, and the same writer’s 
Moderne Ethnologie (1896). 
