218 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IV., No. 83. 



sion, — it is instructive to look at Mr. Wallace's chart 

 of the present soundings, observing that an eleva- 

 tion of under two hundred feet would make Bering 

 Strait land, while moderately shallow sea extends 

 southward to about the line of the Aleutian Islands, 

 below which comes the plunge into the ocean depths. 

 If, then, we are to consider America as having re- 

 ceived its human population by ordinary migration 

 of successive tribes along this highway, the impor- 

 tance is obvious of deciding how old man is in 

 America, and how long the continent remained 

 united with Asia, as well as how these two difficult 

 questions are bound up together in their bearing on 

 anthropology. 



To clear the obscurity of race-problems, as viewed 

 from the anatomical stand-point, we naturally 

 seek the help of language. Of late years the anthro- 

 pology of the old world has had ever-increasing help 

 from comparative philology. Within America the 

 philologist uses with success the strong method of 

 combining dictionary and grammar in order to define 

 his great language-groups; such as the Algonquin, 

 extending from Hudson's Bay to Virginia, the Atha- 

 pascan, from Hudson's Bay to New Mexico, both 

 crossing Canada in their vast range. But attempts 

 to trace analogies between lists of words in Asiatic 

 and American languages, though they may have 

 shown some similarities deserving further inquiry, 

 have hardly proved an amount of correspondence be- 

 yond what chance coincidence would be capable of 

 producing. Thus when it comes to judging of affini- 

 ties between the great American language-families, 

 or of any of them, with the Asiatic, there is only the 

 weaker method of structure to fall back on. Here 

 the Eskimo analogy seems to be with North Asiatic 

 languages, presenting . in an exaggerated form the 

 characteristic structure of the vast Ural-Altaic or 

 Turanian group of Asiatic languages. 



The comparison of peoples according to their social 

 framework of family and tribe has been assuming 

 more and more importance since it was brought for- 

 ward by Bachofen, McLennan, and Morgan. One of 

 its broadest distinctions comes into view within the 

 Dominion of Canada. The Eskimos are patriarchal, 

 the father being head of the family, and descent and 

 inheritance following the male line. But the Indian 

 tribes farther south are largely matriarchal, reckon- 

 ing descent, not on the father's, but the mother's 

 side. In fact, it was through becoming an adopted 

 Iroquois that Morgan became aware of this system, so 

 foreign to European ideas, and which he supposed at 

 first to be an isolated peculiarity. No less a person 

 than Herodotus had fallen into the same mistake over 

 two thousand years ago, when he thought the Lyk- 

 ians, in taking their names from their mothers, were 

 unlike all other men. It is now, however, an accepted 

 matter of anthropology, that, in Herodotus' s time, 

 nations of the civilized world had passed through this 

 matriarchal stage, as appears from the survivals of it 

 retained in the midst of their newer patriarchal insti- 

 tutions. For instance : among the Arabs to this day, 

 strongly patriarchal as their society is in most re- 

 spects, there survives that most matriarchal idea that 



one's nearest relative is not one's father, but one's 

 maternal uncle. He is bound to his sister's children 

 by a ' closer and holier tie ' than paternity, as Tacitus 

 says of the same conception among the ancient Ger- 

 mans. Obviously, great interest attaches to any ac- 

 counts of existing tribes which preserve for us the 

 explanation of such social phenomena. Some of the 

 most instructive of these are too new to have yet 

 found their way into our treatises on early institu- 

 tions: they are accounts lately published by Dutch 

 officials among the non-Islamized clans of Sumatra 

 and Java. Among the Malays of the Padang High- 

 lands of Mid-Sumatra, who are known to represent 

 an early Malay population, not only kinship, but hab- 

 itation, .follows absolutely the female line; so that 

 the numerous dwellers in one great house are all con- 

 nected by descent from one mother, one generation 

 above another, children, then mothers and maternal 

 uncles and aunts, then grandmothers and maternal 

 great-uncles and great-aunts, etc. There are in each 

 district several suku, or mother-clans, between persons 

 born, in which marriage is forbidden. Here, then, 

 appear the two well-known rules of female descent 

 and exogamy ; but now we come into view of the re- 

 markable state of society, that, though marriage exists, 

 it does not form the household. The woman remains 

 in the maternal house she was born in, and the man 

 remains in his. His position is that of an authorized 

 visitor; if he will, he may come over and help her in 

 the rice-field, but he need not : over the children he 

 has no control whatever; and, were he to presume to 

 order or chastise them, their natural guardian, the 

 mother's brother (mamak), would resent it as an af- 

 front. The law of female descent, and its connected 

 rules, have as yet been mostly studied among the 

 native Americans and Australians, where they have 

 evidently undergone much modification. Thus, one 

 hundred and fifty years ago, Father Lafitau mentions 

 that the husband and wife, while, in fact, moving into 

 one another's hut, or setting up a new one, still kept 

 up the matriarchal idea by the fiction that neither he 

 nor she quitted their own maternal house. But, in 

 the Sumatra district just referred to, the matriarchal 

 system may still be seen in actual existence, in a 

 most extreme and probably early form. If, led by 

 such new evidence, we look at the map of the world 

 from this point of view, there discloses itself a re- 

 markable fact of social geography. It is seen that 

 matriarchal exogamous society (that is, society with 

 female descent, and prohibition of marriage within 

 the clan) does not crop up here and there, as if it were 

 an isolated invention, but characterizes a whole vast 

 region of the world. If the Malay district be taken 

 as a centre, the system of intermarrying mother-clans 

 may be followed westward into Asia, among the 

 Garos, and other hill tribes of India. Eastward from 

 the Indian Archipelago it pervades the Melanesian 

 islands, with remains in Polynesia; it prevails widely 

 in Australia, and stretches north and south in the 

 Americas. This immense district represents an area 

 of lower culture, where matriarchalism has only in 

 places yielded to the patriarchal system, which de- 

 velops with the idea of property, and which, in the 



