In this ever more extending restriction of marriage between consanguineous relations, natural selection also remains effective. As Morgan expresses it: "Marriages between gentes that were not consanguineous produced a more vigorous race, pbysically and mentally; two progressive tribes intermarried and the new skulls and brains naturally expanded until they comprised the faculties of both." Thus tribes composed of gentes necessarily either gained the supremacy over the backward ones or, by their example, carried them along in their wake.
The development of the family, then, is founded on the continual contraction of the circle, originally comprising the whole tribe, within which marital intercourse between both sexes was general. By the con-
sanguine family is based on blood kinship, they are right, unless we wish to assign an exceptional position to the Australian strata of generations. But if they go further and declare that the subsequent restrictions of inbreeding and the gentile order have arisen independently of relationships, they commit a far greater mistake than Morgan. They block their way to an understanding of subsequent organizations and force themselves to all sorts of queer assumptions that at once appear as the fruits of imagination, when compared with the actual institutions of primitive peoples.…
This explanation of the phases of development of family institutions contradicts present day views on the matter. Since the scientific Investigations of the last decade have demonstrated beyond doubt that the so-called patriarchal family was preceded by the matriarchal family, it has become the custom to regard descent by females as a natural institution belonging to the very first stages of development which is explained by the modes of existence and thought among savages. Paternity being a matter of speculation, maternity of actual observation, it is supposed to follow that descent by females was always recognized. But the development of the Australian systems of relationship shows that this is not true, at least not in regard to Australians. The fact cannot be disputed away, that we find female lineage among all those higher developed tribes that have progressed to the formation of gentile organizations, but male lineage among all those that have no gentile organizations or where these are only in process of formation. Not a single tribe has been discovered so far, where female lineage was not combined with gentile organization, and I doubt that any will ever be found.
