period of gross savagery, when only uterine filiation was possible. Now, it is a rule that ancient customs endure for a long time, and survive the social condition which had given birth to them.
II. The Family in Africa.
The uterine family is far from being rare in negro Africa, but this does not in any way hinder the man from exercising a discretionary power over his wife or wives, and still more over his children. We have previously seen how lamentable the fate of woman is among the negro Africans, and how excessive are "the rights of the father of the family," since he can traffic in his children without rebuke. This virile despotism may easily coexist with the adoption of uterine filiation. In one Kaffir tribe, the men used their own children to bait their traps for catching lions,[1] and yet maternal filiation prevails in Kaffraria; only it does not govern inheritance. This mode of filiation is adopted by other races as well as Kaffirs. "In Guinea," says Bosman,[2] "if it pleases the daughter of a king to marry a slave, her children are free." Among the Fantees, the chief slave has the rights of succession, to the exclusion of the son; but the latter is only deprived of paternal succession; the property of his mother, as distinct from that of his father, comes to him.[3] At Dahomey there seems to be, in the royal family, a symbolic survival of the maternal family. At the death of the king, his sister exercises a regency of several days, and her duty is to occupy the throne in reality, and to remain seated on it as long as a successor has not been appointed.[4] But this does not in any way hinder the populations of Dahomey from adopting as a general custom, not only masculine succession, but even the right of primogeniture.[5] Barbarous as Dahomey may be, it is already a society of too complex a structure to accommodate itself easily to the
