conduct inevitably results from a sort of compromise in the conflict between their appetites, their aptitudes, and the necessities dictated by their physical environment.
Before hazarding any general conclusions, I shall be careful, as before, to refer to comparative ethnography, and to interrogate the various human races, from the lowest to the most elevated. This inquiry will enable us to form a rough idea, with a certain approximation to truth, in regard to the probable evolution of the family in humanity. But in order to approach this subject with sufficient impartiality, it is absolutely necessary to clear our minds from all the current theories in regard to the family. There is, in fact, no theme which has inspired more empty oratorical lucubrations. The doctrine has been firmly held that the family, as we have it instituted in Europe and in European colonies, is the beau ideal, the sacred and immutable sociological type. Ethnography, however, and even history, teach us that the present familial type of Europe has not always existed, and that it is the result, like everything else, of a slow evolution; from whence it is reasonable to infer that it will still continue to be modified. But facts are more eloquent than reflections; I will therefore approach them, beginning with the lowest human races, the Melanesians. II. The Family in Melanesia.
In my sketch of the family in the animal kingdom, I have already had occasion to remark that the family, such as we understand it, is not indispensable to the maintenance of societies, since the ants do without it in their republics, in which we find neither paternity nor maternity, in the sense we attach to them, but simply three classes of individuals, the breeders, the young, and the educators.
With these last, the working ants, by a paradoxical contradiction, maternal love has survived the atrophy of the generative function; it is even purified and widened, for it is lavished without partiality on all the young ones, which form the hope of the republic; and though thus diluted, it seems to have lost none of its energy.
Nothing at all similar is seen in inferior human societies,
