244 REPOKT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1888. 



the male and female line have equal rights, but everywhere mother 

 rule seems to have preceded father rule. "The couvade or custom in 

 accordance with which the husband takes to his bed and is treated as 

 an invalid when his wife has given birth to a child is perhaps a fiction, 

 intended to transfer to the father those rights over the children which 

 under the previous system of mother-kin, had been enjoyed by the 

 mother alone."* In the evolution of social organization, therefore, 

 matriarchy naturally precedes patriarchy. In the recognition of pater- 

 nity and in the accumulation and inheritance of property from both 

 father and mother, or either, we find the beginnings of patriarchy and 

 of the evolution trom "organization based on kinship to organization 

 based on property." The recognition of property may be in itself the 

 first step in this evolution. With the development of the institution 

 of marriage, man's position in the community becomes fixed by kinship. 

 In the segregation of blood relatives, based on either matriarchy or 

 patriarchy, we get the household. In the organization of consanguiueal 

 kindred, we have the basis of the communal organization. In this 

 stage, "There is no place in a tribe for any person whose kinship is 

 not fixed, and onlj^ those persons can be adopted into the tribe who 

 are adopted into some family with artificial kinship specified. The 

 fabric of Indian society is a complex tissue of kiuship. The warp is 

 made of streams of kindship blood, and the woof of marriage ties." t 

 What has here been briefly said with regard to the origin and de- 

 velopment of the patriarchal form of social organization from the ma- 

 triarchal is peculiarly pertinent to a study and comparison of the 

 ethnical affinities of the tribes of the northwest coast. The southern 

 tribes have very few of the customs and traditions peculiar to the 

 northern, and their social organization is different, '-mother-rule" be- 

 ing peculiar to the northern group and " father-rule" to the southern. 

 Dr. Franz Boas says : 



On account of philological cousideratioas, I think that the social organisation of 

 the Kwakiutl was originally patriarchal, or it may he more correct to say that the 

 male and female line had equal rights. This opinion is founded on the fact that even 

 among the tribes among whom matriarchate prevails at present, the same tei-ms are 

 used for denoting relationship in the male and female lines.t 



No satisfactory inferences as to the influence of these various north- 

 west coast tribes on one another in traditions, customs, and social 

 organization can as yet be drawn in view of the meager data we have. 

 There is no more promising field for sociological study than in this re- 

 gion. In the ceremonial institutions, in the elaborate dance parapher- 

 nalia, in the carved heraldic columns, in the wide variations in the 

 mortuary customs, in all the practices of tribes of highly imaginative 

 and inventive Indians, we have here similarities and differences so be- 



*Frazer, Totemism, p. 78. 



I Major Powell, iu An. Rept., Bureau of Ethnology, T, p. (j9. 



t .Science, Vol. Xil, No. 299, ]). 19.^>. 



