^ MTA NÉPRAJZI KUTÄTÔ CSPPORT KÖNYVTARA LELTÁR: VUuj - ^ ON THE ORIGIN OF THE CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEM OF RELATIONSHIPS By W. H. E. RIVERS, Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge Lewis Morgan is the only modern writer who has attempted to formulate a complete scheme of the evolution of the human family, a scheme based almost entirely on a study of the classificatory system of relationships of which he was the discoverer. According to this scheme human society has advanced from a state of complete promiscuity to one characterized by monogamy by a gradual evolution, the three chief stages of which Morgan called the consanguine, the Punaluan, and the monogamiaii families. In recent years the scheme has encountered much opposition, especially from Starcke,1 Wester-marck,2 Crawley,3 Andrew Lang,4 and N. W. Thomas,5 the last calling Morgan's whole structure a house of cards, and it may perhaps be said that the prevailing tendency in anthropology" is against any scheme which would derive human society from a state of promiscuity, whether complete or of that modified form to which the term group-marriage is usually applied. The opponents of Morgan have made no attempt to distinguish between different parts of his scheme, but having shown that certain of its features are unsatisfactory, they have condemned the whole. The elaborate scheme of Morgan can be divided into two distinct parts, one dealing with the existence of the consanguine family and the evolution from this of the Punaluan family, while the other part deals with the existence of this latter form of the family itself. It will be my object in this paper to point out a radical defect in the first part of Morgan's scheme, and then to endeavour to restate the 1 The Primitive Family, London, 1889. 2 Histonj of Human Marriage, 3rd ed., 1901. :' The Mystic Bose, London, 1902. 4 Social Origins, London, 1903, p. 90. 0 Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia, Cambridge, 1906. ° The chief exception among those who have written on this subject in recent years is Köhler ; see Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe, Stuttgart, 1897. „M 310 ON THE OKIGIN OF THE second part of his scheme in accordance with the knowledge which has accumulated since his time. The existence of both the consanguine and Punaluan families was deduced by Morgan from the characters of the classificatory system of relationships. This system is found throughout the whole of North America, and probably exists also in the South. It is universal throughout the Pacific—in Polynesia, Melanesia, New Guinea, and Australia. It is found in India, and some typical examples have been reported from Africa, over which continent it is probably very widely spread. Vestiges of it are found in other parts of the world, and it is probable that relationships have been expressed in this way by all the races of the world in the early stages of their development. The most important feature of the system is that large groups of people who, according to our ideas, are related in very different ways and in very different degrees are all ranged in the same category. The same name is given to a distant cousin once removed, for example, as is given to the father. On the other hand, relatives who are given the same name by most civilized people are in the classificatory system often rigorously distinguished. In this paper I propose to consider how far there is reason to believe that this system had its origin in the organization of early society, and especially in the early modes of relationship between men and women. In the first part of the paper I shall deal with the evidence provided by the system for the existence of Morgan's consanguine family, and in the second part shall consider the origin of the system in a condition of group-marriage. Tlie Nature of Morgan's Malayan System. Morgan's belief in the existence of the consanguine family, which corresponds to what is often called the undivided commune, was based entirely on the view that the variety of the classificatory system which he called Malayan1 was the earliest form of the system. If it can be shown that the Malayan form represents a late stage in the development of the system, the whole evidence for the consanguine family falls to the ground so far as it is provided by 1 The actual examples on which Morgan based his Malayan system were from Polynesia, the name Malayan being chosen by him because he regarded the Polynesians as a branch of the Malayan family (Ancient Society, p. 403). In spite of much recent work on the Malays we are still almost wholly in the dark as to the kind of kinship system found among the different branches of that people. . CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEM OF RELATIONSHIPS 311 the classificatory system, and Morgan himself acknowledged3 that his hypothesis of the consanguine family rested principally, if not wholly, on this foundation. Morgan supposed that the Polynesian societies which possessed the Malayan system were in a pristine state of culture, and he believed that their system of relationships revealed a corresponding primitive state of the evolution of the human family. We now know that Polynesian society is relatively highly developed, and it may j perhaps be held to be superfluous to show that their kinship system, instead of being archaic as Morgan supposed, is a late product of 1 change. I have been unable to find, however, that any student of I the subject, whether supporter or opponent of Morgan, has refused to accept the Malayan form as primitive, and since the belief in its primitiveness is at the bottom of many of the difficulties in connexion with this subject, the evidence in favour of the lateness of the system may be given. The special characteristic of the Malayan or Polynesian system is the small number of terms and the corresponding wide connotation of each. The same terms are used to denote relationships for which many different terms are found in most forms of the classificatory system; thus, excluding differences dependent on age and sex, all the relatives of a speaker of the same generation as himself are addressed by the same name. The distinctions between father's brother and mother's brother and between father's sister and mother's sister which are usual in the classificatory system are not present, and there is a corresponding absence of distinctive names for their children. Morgan supposed that we had in this system the survival of a state of society in which all the members of a group corresponding to the brothers and sisters of a later stage intermarried indiscriminately, the consanguine family which he advanced as the earliest stage of human society. I hope to show that this wide connotation of relationship terms I is late, and not primitive, by pointing out that elsewhere we find | examples where classificatory systems are undergoing changes which j are modifying them in the direction of the Hawaian form. My I attention was directed to this problem by a study of the relationship ° systorisofTorres^traits. We have in these islands two peoples in diiferent conditions of social organization. In both there is patrilineal descent, with fairly definite evidence in one case at least that ' Ancient Society, pp. 385, 388, 402. 312 ON. THE OKIGIN OF THE the people have emerged from a previous condition of mother-right, and the high degree of development of the idea of property would seem to indicate that their social condition is far from being of a primitive kind. On examining the social organization of the two communities we find additional evidence of their relatively advanced condition. The organization of the western islanders is totemic, probably in a relatively late stage, there being evidence of a previous dual organization which has become extinct. The social condition of the.eastern islanders is probably still more advanced, having a territorial basis, with few traces of the conditions of mother-right and totemism from which they have nevertheless probably emerged. On studying the kinship system of these two peoples we find different stagesjrfchji^ In the islanTTôT-* Mabuiag in the west the distinction between the children of father's brother and mother's brother is not present, and the name given to these relatives is also given to the children of father's sister and mother's sister. That the absence of the distinction is due to loss, and not to imperfect development, is rendered probable by the condition of the terms used for the older generation; here there are still distinct terms for father's brother, mother's brother, father's sister and mother's sister, but there are definite signs that these distinctions are becoming blurred, and that the people are on their way to giving the same name to the relationships of father's sister and mother's sister, and possibly even to those of father's brother and mother's brother. In the Murray Islands in the east, on the other hand, there is still present the distinction between the children of father's brother and mother's brother; but here the distinction between mother's sister and father's sister which seemed to be in process of disappearance in Mabuiag has completely gone. For the I full evidence on these points I must refer to the articles on ' Kinship' in the fifth and sixth volumes of the Reports of the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits. I can only say that the evidence is strongly in favour of the wide connotation of certain kinship terms in Torres Straits being a product of late change. These changes would not have to go very much further to produce kinship systems approaching very closely to that of Hawaii, and thus a strong supposition is raised in favour of the Polynesian system being also a product of late change. If we now turn to Australian systems we find that it is universal, so far as the evidence goes, to have distinctive names for the four ■,*s»TOäiÄ($iSffe( '■' CLASSIFICATOKY SYSTEM OF KEL ATIONS HIPS 313 kinds of relative of the generation older than the speaker, viz. father and father's brother, mother's brother, father's sister, and mother and mother's sister. Similarly, in the next generation it seems to be almost universal, ignoring differences according to age, to have one designation for father's brother's children and mother's sister's children and another designation for mother's brother's children and father's sister's children. The only exception with which I have met is very instructive from the point of view which I am considering in this paper. The exception is found in the case of the Kurnai. In this tribe, which differs from all other Australian tribes in its mode of social organization, there are separate designations for father's brother, father's sister, mother's brother and mother's sister, but in the next generation the corresponding distinctions are absent and the children of mother's brother and father's sister receive the same names as the children of father's brother and mother's sister. In this respect the Kurnai system resembles that of the island of Mabuiag in Torres Straits while it retains the distinction between father's sister and mother's sister which has disappeared in Murray Island. In one place' Howitt_speaks of the Kurnai system as primitive, though two pages later he expresses doubts about this. The case seems to be very much like that of the Torres Straits people in that the social system of the Kurnai has a territorial basis with patrilineal descent, and few anthropologists would doubt that it represents a late stage in the evolution of Australian society. There can be equally little doubt that the special features of the kinship system of the Kurnai depend on loss of distinctions which once existed, rather than on a failure to develop distinctions found everywhere else in Australia. If we accept the view that both the Kurnai and the people of Torres Straits show us late developments of social organization, Ave are confronted with the fact that in these relatively advanced societies we find variants of the classificatory system which bring them near to the Hawaian form, though in none of the three has the generalization reached the degree present in that form. We now know that the people of Hawaii and other Polynesians are far more advanced in social culture than the inhabitants of either Torres Straits or Australia, and it seems an almost inevitable j' Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 168. 814 ON THE ORIGIN OF THE conclusion that the changes which have occurred in the less advanced peoples have in the more advanced peoples proceeded still further in the same direction, and have produced the system characterized by the extremely wide connotation of the relationship terms to which Morgan gave the name of Malayan. If we now turn from these regions bordering on the Pacific Ocean to the islands of the Ocean itself we find evidence pointing, I think, in the same direction. We find that the relationship .systems of Fiji and Tonga possess the distinctions between father's brother and mother's brother and between father's sister and mother's sister, and they also possess the distinction between the children of father's brother and mother's sister on the one hand and mother's brother and father's sister on the other hand. No one can have any doubt that the people of Fiji and Tonga are in a much more primitive stage of social evolution than the people of Hawaiis perhaps the most advanced of Polynesian societies, and though it is of course possible that the more developed society, so far as general culture is concerned, may have preserved a more pristine system of relationships, the association of highly developed general culture and a late form of relationship system is by far the more probable. So far as I am aware, we have no accounts of the Hawaian system other than that recorded by Morgan, but an account of the allied Maori system has recently been recorded by Elsdon Best,1 and I think that any one who compares this account with those of the Torres Straits or Fiji can have very little doubt that we have in the former a later stage of the Papuan or Melanesian system. It would seem that just as the Polynesian languages have arisen by simplification of those of the Melanesian family, so have the Polynesian kinship systems arisen by simplification of a variety resembling those found among Papuan and Melanesian peoples at the present time. Lastly, let us go to Morgan's own people, the North American Indians. Among the systems recorded by Morgan himself we find some which approach the Malayan system. I will take only one example. An isolated band of the Iroquois, called the Two Mountain Iroquois, had a form of the classificatory system in which the father's brother was distinguished from the mother's brother (though the two names are singularly alike); but the distinction between father's sister and mother's sister was not present, nor was 1 Journ. Anthrop. Instil, 1902, vol. xxxii, p. 185. CLASSIFICATOBY SYSTEM OF KELATIONSHIPS 815 any distinction made between the children of the father's brother, father's sister, mother's brother and mother's sister. Thus we have in the case of this Iroquois tribe a system which is rather nearer the Hawaian system than that of either Mabuiag or Murray Island, each taken alone. If the definite loss which the Mabuiag system has undergone were combined with the loss which the Murray Island •system has suffered, we should have before us a system almost identical with that of the Two Mountain Iroquois. The Two Mountain Iroquois were colonists from the Mohawks and Oneidas who had settled above Montreal, and if their system is to be regarded as primitive, we have to suppose that this small band, who had apparently separated from the main body at no distant date, had preserved a primitive form, while the main body showed the usual features of the classificatory system. The system of the Two Mountain Iroquois was collected by Morgan himself, and we may therefore expect it to be accurate, and it is surprising that Morgan should have allowed this peculiar system to pass almost without notice, for more attention to it might have led him to revise his opinion that the Malayan form represents an early stage in the evolution of the classificatory system, and with the disappearance of the Malayan system as a primitive mode of expressing relationships would also have disappeared his sole evidence for the existence of the consanguine family. The Origin of the Classificatory System in Group-marriage. In the first part of this paper I have dealt with Morgan's evidence for the existence of the consanguine family, and I have shown that so far as the classificatory system of relationships is j concerned we have no evidence for this form of the family. As \ I am not here concerned with the general problem of the existence \ or non-existence of this form of the family but only with the evidence for it derived from the classificatory system, I can pass on to the second part of Morgan's scheme, again premising that I have only to deal with the existence of the Punaluan family so far as the evidence for it is derived from the nature of the classificatory system. By the Punaluan family Morgan meant a form of the family characterized by the existence of group-marriage, to use his own words, ' founded upon the intermarriage of several sisters, own and 316 ON THE OBIGIN OP THE collateral, with each other's husbands, in a group,' and l on the intermarriage of several brothers, own and collateral, with eäélí other's wives, in a group'. In each case he supposed that the spouses on one side need not necessarily be of kin to one another. As Mr. Thomas has shown, the expression group-marriage has been used very loosely by recent writers, and it will perhaps conduce to clearness if we adopt Mr. Thomas's definition, though it does not correspond exactly with that of Morgan's. When I use the expression 1 group-marriage', I shall therefore mean a marriage occurring in a community divided into definite groups, whether they be clans, classes, phratries, in which all the men of one group are the husbands of all the women of the other group, and all the women of the first group are the wives of the men of the second group. According to this definition all the husbands or wives would be related as members of the same group, and it is in this respect that the definition may differ from that of Morgan. The arguments for the existence of group-marriage derived from the classificatory system are briefly as follows. Often, but not by any means in all forms of the system, a man of one group will apply the same term to all the women of another group of a certain generation which he applies to his wife, and conversely all the women of one group may apply the same term to all the men of another group and of their own generation which they apply to their own individual husbands, and it has been argued that these terms are survivals of a state of society in which there were actual marital relations between those who used the terms. Secondly, a child of one group will give the same term to all the men of his father's group and generation which he applies to his own father, i. e. to all those who under the last heading would in some systems be called husbands by his mother, and it is supposed that this wide use of the term ' father ' is similarly a survival of a state of society in which all the men of a certain standing in the opposite group were his potential fathers. To this argument the objection is made that the child in all forms of the classificatory system gives the same name to the women of his own group and of the same generation as his mother as he gives to his own mother. This objection to the value of the classificatory system as a test of previous social conditions was recognised by Darwin in his reference to the views of Morgan in The Descent of Man.1 He 1 1871, vol. ii, p. 359. CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEM OF RELATIONSHIPS 317 remarks ' that it seems almost incredible that the relationship of the child to its mother should ever be completely ignored, especially as the women in most savage tribes nurse their infants for a long time'. The objection still continues to influence many in their attitude towards the classificatory system, and the most recent writer on the subject, Mr. N. W. Thomas, has regarded the objection as a reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis of group-marriage, and has jocularly commended such a belief in group-motherhood to the notice of zoologists. Two quite different answers to the objection are possible. It may be that there was once a definite term for the individual relation between mother and child, and that the term became extended at a later stage of evolution so as to fall into line with other kinship terms. That such an extension of meaning can have taken place is summarily dismissed by Mr. Thomas as involving a process for which we have no evidence and for which no reason can be seen. As a matter of fact, however, as will be apparent from what I have said in the first part of this paper, people in low states of culture do extend the meaning of their kinship terms. Relatives once distinguished may come to receive the same appellation, and I see no reason to doubt that this process of generalization may have contributed to extend the connotation of the term ' mother'. The other answer, however, probably presents more nearly the genesis of that generalized relationship which we have to translate by that of mother and child. In such a state of society as that we must assume when the system of relationships was in process of development, it is not probable that the special relationship between mother and child would have persisted beyond the time of weaning. Let us assume that the weaning did not take place till the child was three years old 2 and the separation would have occurred before the age at which the child began to learn the terms of relationship to any great extent. It is even possible that in this early stage of culture the duty of suckling may have been shared by other women of the group, and that, at the time of weaning, the child might not have been in the position to differentiate between its own mother and the other child-bearing women of the group. 1 Op. cit, p. 123. a I have assumed that weaning took place at this late age, because this now happens among many races of low culture, but if it was earlier, my argument is only strengthened. 318 ON THE ORIGIN OF THE To those unacquainted with society in low stages of culture it may seem very strange that a child should grow up without being able to distinguish his own mother from other women of his community. We know, however, that in relatively advanced societies with paternal descent, as in the Murray Islands, a man may grow up without knowing his real father and mother. In this case we have to do with adoption, and the case is therefore not parallel, but the occurrence of such ignorance in a relatively highly-developed community may help us to understand the absence of the knowledge of the personality of the mother at the much lower stages of social evolution which we have to assume at the time of origin of the classificatory system. Again, the subject of adoption, which I have just mentioned, may throw some light on the matter. The people of the Murray Islands carry the custom of adoption to what seems to us an absurd extreme, and children are transferred from family to family in a way for which the people can give no adequate reason, nor can any adequate reason be found in the other features of the social or religious institutions of the people. I do not wish to go so far as to suggest that this custom of adoption may be a survival of a state of society in which children were largely common to the women of the group so far as nurture was concerned; but this is possible, and in any case this wholesale adoption may help the civilized person to understand that people of low culture may have different ideas in connexion with parentage from those prevalent among ourselves, and that the idea of group-motherhood is not as absurd as Mr. Thomas supposes. Only one other relationship term raises any serious difficulty, viz. the application of the same terms to all the children of the group which are applied to own brothers and sisters, but if my line of argument is accepted to explain ' group-motherhood', the existence of group-brotherhood and sisterhood will present no difficulty. The point which I have considered is the most definitely formulated objection which has been brought against the value of the classificatory system as evidence in favour of group-marriage. The older objections J were based on the idea that the system is only a table of terms of address, a view which by no means removes the necessity for a theory of its origin. The tendency of more recent 1 McLennan, Studies in Ancient History, 1876, p. 366. See also Westermarck, op. cit., p. 89. CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEM OP RELATIONSHIPS 319 objectors has been to show that the terms of the system are expressive of status and duties and not of consanguinity or affinity.1 I shall return to this point later and will only say now that the view that the classificatory system had its origin in group-marriage implies that it was in its origin expressive of status rather than of consanguinity and affinity. Merely to reply to objections raised by others is, however, hardly satisfying. In the earlier part of my paper I hav& shown that we have reason to modify Morgan's scheme in a very fundamental respect, and it is now evidently necessary to restate the mode of the hypothetical origin of the classificatory system in a condition of group-marriage. Such a statement must be so highly problematical and must involve so many doubtful features that I am very loath to undertake the task. I only do so because I believe it may assist clearness in the discussion of the problem if some definitely outlined scheme has been formulated which may make clear the points on which further evidence is required. My aim will be to suggest a state of society which would be capable of explaining the origin of the classificatory system of relationships and at the same time is not in obvious conflict with what we know of man in low states of culture. I shall have to begin by making certain assumptions. First, I assume that at the time the classificatory system had its origin, the custom of exogamy was already in existence, and further I assume, for the sake of simplicity, though it is not essential to my argument, that the community possesses only two exogamous I sections, Avhich I will call moieties. We now have so much evidence ' of such a dual division of early society that there are few who will object to this assumption, though my argument would apply equally well if there were more than two exogamous divisions of the community. Further, I assume, again for convenience' sake, that the child belongs to the division or moiety of its mother. This mode of counting descent is again so widespread in communities of low culture that few will quarrel with this assumption. In the hypothetical com-1 munity I assume we have therefore two moieties united in group- [ marriage^ all the active men of one group being the husbands of luTI the child-bearing women of the other group. In each moiety four! groups of people would be roughly distinguished; the active men, 1 Lang, Social Origins, p. 102; N. W. Thomas, op. cit., p. 123. 320 ON THE ORIGIN OF THE the child-bearing women, the elders and the children. The distinctions between these groups will be fairly clear except in one case. All that we know of savage society would lead us to expect that there would be a sharp distinction between the group of children and their seniors. The widespread ceremonies of initiation point to a time when there was a complete change of status at this period of life, and I assume that the change takes place at a definite time, i. e. that a boy does not become a man gradually as with us, but suddenly at the period of initiation. The distinction between child-bearing and older women would also present no difficulties, and the chief trouble in imagining the state of society I suggest arises in connexion with the distinction between the active men and the elders. If I may be allowed to pass over this difficulty for the present, we should find in such a society that a child would recognize in his community people who stand to him in eight different relations. In his own moiety there would be the group of child-bearing women to whom he would give a name which was the origin of that we now translate ' mother'. Secondly, there would be the active men of his own moiety to whom he would give a name which later came to denote a relationship which we translate 'mother's brother'. Thirdly, there would be the group of children to whom names would be given which later came to mean ' brother' and ' sister'. Lastly, there would be the group of elders whose names would have been the origin of the terms translated ' grandfather' and ' grandmother'. In the other moiety there would be four corresponding groups ; men to whom the child would give the name which we now translate ' father '; the group whom he would call by the name which came to mean ' father's sister'; the children of the moiety to whom he would give a name which later came to denote the children of the mother's brother and father's sister; and lastly there would be the group of elders who would probably receive the same names as the elders of his own moiety. Such a state of society would give us the chief terms which we find in the classificatory system, and new terms would be developed as the social organization became more complex. In such a state of society I suppose that the status of a child would change when he becomes an adult, and that with this change of status there would be associated a change in the relationship in which he would stand to the members of the different groups. The great difficulty in the acceptance of my scheme is to see how the CLASSIFICATOEY SYSTEM OF RELATIONSHIPS 321 relationships set up by these age-groups developed into those regulated by generations such as we find among most people of low culture at the present time. I cannot here attempt to follow out such a development in any detail, but I think it is possible to see the general lines on which one almost universal feature of the classificatory system may have evolved, viz. the distinction between elder and younger, especially frequent in the case of brothers and sisters. A man would probably tend to distinguish with some definiteness those who became adults earlier than himself from those who came later to this rank; he would tend to distinguish sharply between those who helped in his initiatory ceremonies and those to whom he was himself one of the initiators, and this distinction between seniors and juniors would probably be carried over into the system of relationships which gradually developed as the group-relations developed into more individual relations between men and women, and as the society became organized into generations in the place of status-or age-groups. There still exist in various parts of the world societies possessing age-grades,1 which may well be survivals of some such condition of social organization as that I suppose to have been the origin of the classificatory system. We have at present no evidence to show what relation there may be between these age-grades and the systems of relationships, but it is to be hoped that future investigation into the system of relationships of some community possessing age-grades may furnish material for the elucidation of the process by which the evolution from age-groups to generations has taken place. What I suppose to have happened is that there were at first purely group-relationships which received names; that from these named relationships the people were led to formulate certain further distinctions which reacted on the group-relationships and assisted in their conversion into relationships such as we find to characterize the classificatory system at the present time. If I am right in the main lines of the sketch I have just given, the classificatory system was in its origin expressive entirely of 1 For a full account of these age-grades, see Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde, Berlin, 1902. Unfortunately, Schurtz complicates the problem connected with age-grades by including in this type of social organization the Australian matrimonial classes which have probably had an origin very different from that of true age-grades elsewhere. ITLOR Y 822 OF THE ORIGIN OF THE status. The terms would stand for certain relations within the group to which only the vaguest ideas of consanguinity need have been attached. Several recent writers have urged that the classi-ficatory system as we find it to-day is expressive of status only, and they have regarded this as a conclusive objection to Morgan's views. In the attacks made on Morgan's scheme during his lifetime the objections raised were of a different kind, being directed to show that the system was merely a collection of terms of address and had nothing to do with status and duties so far as status implied any function in the social economy. If Morgan were now alive I believe he would agree to a very great extent with those who regard the systems as expressions of status and duties so far as their origin is concerned, though his unfortunate error about the nature of the ' Malayan system prevented him from seeing to how great an extent the terms arose out of purely status relationships. It may be objected that he called the classificatory system one of consanguinity and affinity, but he called it this because, whatever may have been its origin, there is not the slightest doubt that at the present time the system is an expression of consanguinity and affinity to those who use it. I have now investigated the classificatory system in three communities,1 and in all three it is perfectly clear that distinct ideas of consanguinity and affinity2 are associated with the terms. The correct use of the terms was over and over again justified by reference to actual blood or marriage ties traceable in the genealogical records preserved by the people, though in other cases in which the terms were used they denoted merely membership of the same social group and could not be justified by distinct ties of blood or marriage relationship. There is in these three peoples definite evidence of the double nature of the classificatory system as an expression of status and of consanguinity, and there are definite indications of a mode of evolution of the systems by which they are coming to express status less and ties of consanguinity and affinity more. The evidence relating to the classificatory system brought forward by most of the recent critics of Morgan has been derived chiefly from the Australians, and, so far as our existing evidence goes, it would seem that the status aspect of their systems is more prominent than ' Mabuiag and Murray Islands in Torres Straits, and the Todas in India. 2 By consanguinity I mean blood relationship; by affinity, marriage relationship. CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEM OF RELATIONSHIPS 323 in other parts of the world, as would be expected from the very special development of matrimonial classes among them; but even in Australia it is probable that the aspect of the systems as expressions of consanguinity and affinity is far more important than the published accounts lead one to believe. The true relation between the classificatory system and the actual ties of blood and marriage relationship can only be properly brought out by a full application of the genealogical method, and this method has not yet been applied in Australia. That there is sometimes a definite connexion between marriage regulations and the classificatory terms of relationship there can be no doubt. Thus I have shown elsewhere * that the terms used by Dravidian peoples provide definite indications of the marriage of_ cousmSj_which is a feature of their society; and similarly there is an evident relation between the classificatory terms and forms of marriage among the North American Indians.3 When we find special features of the classificatory system to have had their origin in special forms of marriage, it becomes the more probable that its general features are the survivals of some general form of marriage. My object in this paper has been to support the view that the features of the classificatory system of relationship as we find them at the present time have arisen out of a state of group-marriage, while pointing out that this system lends no support to the view that the state of group-marriage was preceded by one of wholly unregulated promiscuity. I should like again to insist that it has not been my object to consider here the problems involved in the growth of the human family in general, but only to deal with the evidence provided by the classificatory system of relationships. The classificatory system in one form or another is spread so widely over the world as to make it probable that it has had its origin in some universal, or almost universal, stage of social development, and I have attempted to indicate that the kind of society which most readily accounts for its chief features is one characterized by a form of marriage in which definite groups of men are the husbands of definite groups of women. 1 Journ. Roy. Asiat. Soc, 1907, p. 611. 2 See Köhler, op. cit, p. 82. Y 2 - - - .....-■ ■-■■'' ..... .....-.,..,.^- . J#ľ'l Anthropilogiesl Ásažro p^@s«nt to Eisurá Btsrnétt $ylěe.% ia Hönoi^ ?f .M* 75tii Birthday ö@t. 2*.' 19©7» "' / QgfQTd s$ th§ Qtemnátm $mm» 19®?'#* 3>09— 3Z1>. Uppsala Vn±Vé Bibl.