required;[1] she belongs to him alone. Sometimes the ravisher legalises his right of sole proprietor by first giving notice to his friends, and offering them the use of his wife, after which he can keep her to himself.[2]
In proportion as tribal marriage was being transformed, owing to the breaches made in it by individual instinct, the consanguineous family was gradually arising in place of the collective and fictitious family. It seems most likely that uterine filiation, or the maternal family, was first established. The Australian Motas still have filiation by the woman's side, and among them the property of the uncle is transmitted to the uterine nephew; but already the paternal family is beginning to be constituted, and the relatives on the male side seek to redeem the heritage by means of an indemnity.[3] With other and more advanced Australian tribes, fanatical evolution is more complete; masculine filiation is already instituted, and agnation adopted; there is even a worship of the manes of male ancestors.[4] The Melanesians of Australia and Tasmania present, therefore, a tolerably complete picture of the evolution of marriage and of the family, from the primitive rape, followed by a tribal period in which marriage is merely a limited and regulated promiscuity, and in which real consanguinity is replaced by a fictitious fraternity, down to the régime of individual marriage and masculine filiation, previously passing through uterine filiation, or the maternal family. We shall find traces of this evolution among other races, but nowhere is the lower stage so well preserved as in Australia. III. The Family in America.
Nothing similar to the gross tribal marriage of the Australian Kamilaroi is to be found among the American Indians, whose familial organisation, however, strikingly recalls that of the Melanesian clans, though already in a higher degree of evolution.
