158 The Classificaiory System of 



woman as my child, and it recognises me as its father, the 

 irresistible inference is that I cohabit with its mother. 



In the Communal Family a child addresses any and every 

 male of the generation next above its own as "father," 

 because all those males cohabiting with all the females of 

 that generation, among whom its mother is one, any one of 

 them may be its father ; and though it can, of course, 

 distinguish its own mother from among those females, }'et it 

 calls them all "mother," because they are all the wives of 

 the men whom it balls " father." 



The Communal Family then appears to consist of a 

 number of men banded together for the purpose of securing 

 to themselves against the agoTcssion of males outside the 

 family the exclusive possession of a number of women all of 

 whom are theoretically their sisters. I say theoretically, 

 because it is evident at a glance that not all these women 

 are own sisters to the males, those whom we should call 

 cousins being included among them. And supposing the 

 human race to have begun with a single pair ; supposing, 

 moreover, the absence of a purer teaching from without, or 

 (what would have the same effect) the persistent disregard, 

 resulting in utter forgetfulness, of that purer teaching, this is 

 precisely that which we should expect to be the earliest form 

 of the family. A nation might be either one such family, or 

 a number of such families banded together for mutual 

 protection. 



We now come to the Barbaric Family, of which we have 

 found two forms, called, for the sake of convenience, the 

 Turanian and the Ganowanian, the latter term being 

 compounded of two North American Indian words, gano, an 

 arrow, and waano, a bow. This form of the family has been 

 found by Mr. Morgan among all the North American 

 Indians, the Tamil and Telugu tribes of South India, and 

 among many other nations ; but not having yet received 

 his book from the Smithsonian, I cannot state the extent 

 of his discoveries. I myself have found it among the 

 Fijian, the Friendly Islanders, and more or less modified 

 ■among several Australian tribes. This system is founded 

 upon the Malayan, and is a most important advance upon 

 it. Its chief characteristics are as follow : — 



1. Grandparents, as in the Malayan. 



2. All my father's brothers are my fathers. All my 

 mother's sisters are my mothers. This also is Malayan. But 



