groups of brothers, and it results quite naturally in a system of kinship by classes, holding real consanguinity very cheap.
It seems probable that analogous systems of kinship may have been adopted by the greater number of the Asiatic Mongols. This may at least be inferred from the fragmentary but significant accounts with which explorers have supplied us. Among the Yourak Samoyedes, it is forbidden to marry a woman of the same tribe (or rather clan).[1] The people among the Kalmucks are subject to restrictions of the same kind in regard to marriage, which must not take place within three or four degrees of kinship. The great men, however, for whom the laws are more lenient in all countries, sometimes obtain immunity from these inconvenient obligations, but the populace is very much shocked at their laxity. "Great men and dogs," they say, "have no kin." Nevertheless, the sons of the great men, who often also marry their sisters-in-law, always take a wife in another clan.[2] Kinship by classes surely existed among the Mongols only a few centuries ago, for Baber, the founder of the Mongol Empire of Delhi, speaks in his Memoirs of one of his lieutenants, named Lenguer Khan, who possessed a whole tribe of maternal uncles, the Djendjouhah, forming a people who lived in the mountains of the Punjaub.[3] V. The Evolution of the System of Kinship by Classes.
These facts, and the inferences they suggest, enable us to solve a difficulty which has embarrassed an eminent sociologist, L. Morgan, to whom we owe our acquaintance with the details of the curious systems of kinship by classes prevailing among the Polynesians and the Redskins.
Morgan, in comparing, term for term, the denominations indicating kinship among the Iroquois-Senecas and the Tamils of India, found them identical as to meaning and number, and he admits, but not without hesitation, that there has been, in both races, a parallel and spontaneous
