among the Australians, the Redskins, the Tamils, etc., has furnished us with, they warrant us in believing that the Chinese paternal family is the last term of an evolution having for its starting-point the familial clan, and having passed through the maternal family.
Let us add, in conclusion, that the system of fictitious kinships is reflected throughout the governmental organisation of China. In reality the political structure of China is only an enlarged copy of the family. The emperor is the reputed father and even mother of all the empire. The mandarin who governs a town is the "father" of that town, and he himself has for "governmental father" the mandarin of a superior grade, whom he obeys.[1]
We shall now discover traces of a similar evolution of the family among the Semites and Berbers.
II. The Family among Semitic Races.
When we read the word "patriarch" in our current literature, our thoughts instantly fly to the chief of the ancient Semitic, and especially the Hebraic family, the little tyrant holding grouped under his despotic sway his wives, children, and slaves—that is to say, the patriarchate in all its severity, with the power of life and death attributed to the patriarch. But this Semitic patriarch has not existed from the beginning; he is the result of a long anterior evolution, and, like so many other peoples, the Semites have begun with the confused kinship of the familial clan. We have previously found, in studying primitive marriage among the Arabs, an ancient régime of free polyandry, analogous to that of the Naïrs. At this distant epoch the woman still bore children for her clan, and this clan was so much like a large family, that in the present day even, in certain parts of Arabia, the word used for clan literally signifies "flesh."[2] To be of the same clan, therefore, was to be of the same flesh.
It was in a relatively recent epoch that paternal filiation was established among the Arabs. In the time of the
