Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/29

 Chinese, to Fohi. As to polyandry, among Aryans of ; India, a famous passage in the Mdhdbharata tells how tho five brothers Pandava &quot; married the fair Draaupadi with ! eyes of lotus blue.&quot; The whole legend of these princes is so marked with the stamp of polyandrous institutions that the very terminology of polyandry, the system of nomen clature called &quot; classificatory,&quot; is retained. Grand-uncles, in this episode of the Mahalharata, as among the Red Indians, are called grandfathers, and uncles fathers. If, then, the Aryan race was not originally organized like the polyandrous Thibetans, the legends which declare these facts are at least singular examples of &quot; undesigned I coincidence.&quot; Before coming to that conclusion, it is now necessary to examine certain symbolic customs, certain laws of inheritance and of prohibited degrees, and so to de termine whether the looser relations of savages may not have been the material out of which the modern family was gradually fashioned. This can scarcely be called a new, though it has never been a popular opinion. Mr Millar, professor of law in the university of Glasgow, expressed it distinctly in his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, p. 47 (4th edition, Edinburgh, 1806). 3. If the practices which make kindred through males difficult or impossible to recognize were ever universally prevalent, they will have left vestiges of their existence in the custom of tracing descent through females. Again, where that custom is met with, though marriage has become fixed, and where women are mistresses of the household and heads of the family, it is not easy to give any other explanation of these facts than this, that they are survivals from a time when the union of the sexes was vague and temporary. Where, then, do we meet with examples of kindred traced through the female line ] Kindred through women is recognized in Australia (with exceptions among certain tribes), in the Marianne Islands, in Fiji, Tonga, and some other isles of the Pacific, and in the Carolina Islands. Among the Kars of the Golden Chersonese, the tribes arc divided into Sgans, who recognize male descent, and Pwos, who reckon by the mother s side. The natives of the province of Keang-se &quot; are celebrated among the natives of the other Chinese provinces for the mode or form used by them in address, which is Laon peaon,&quot; para- phrastically translated (Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, p. 452), &quot;Oh, you old fellow, brother mine by some of the ramifications of female relationship ! &quot; To select some more modern instances from M. Giraud Toulon s collections (Origine de la Famille, Geneva, 1874, p. 15), the Singhalese, the Nairs of Malabar, the Kocchs, an Indian tribe, and the Zaporogue Cossacks, with the red men of North America as a rule, and the Indians of British Guinea, to whom we may add many African tribes (Bowditch, Mission to Ashantee, p. 185, London, 1873 ; Munzinger, Ost-Afrikanische Studien, 1864), count kindred by the mother s side. Another collection of examples will be found in Mr M Lennan s Primitive Marriage. Strabo reports that among the Iberians women were heads of families (i. 214, 319; iii. 165), and Cordier (Anciennes coutumes de Barege) shows that among the Basques women inherited property to the exclusion of males as late as the eighteenth century. The legislation of the Revolution changed all this, but a popular song still testifies to the annoyance of les Ju ritieres. This ancient custom thus fulfils the proverb, &quot;Tout finit par des chan sons&quot; (Giraud Teulon, La Mere chez certains peuples de VAntiquite, Paris, 1867, p. 42). Among ancient peoples there are very many more or less distinct vestiges of female kinship, Herodotus, it is true, says of the Lycians (i. 173), &quot;This custom they have to themselves, and herein agree with no other men, in that they name themselves by the mother s side and not by the father s. And if one ask 19 another who he is, lie will recount his maternal descent, and reckon up his mother s maternal ancestors.&quot; Now, so far from this mode of deducing descent being peculiar to the Lycians, it was in vogue among the Locrians (Polybius, 12, v., and Krcerpta Hist. Grate. Frag., Rome, 1827, p. 384). In the bilingual Etruscan inscriptions, according to M. Giraud Teulon (Origine de la Famille, p. 21), to whom we owe many of these citations, &quot; the Etruscan text con tains only the name of the mother of the dead, while the Latin text gives that of the father.&quot; Certain Egyptian mortuary inscriptions give the name of the mother, while the accompanying Creek text gives that of the father. A stele found in the ruins of the temple at Napata by Marietta Bey (Revue Archeologi^uc, May 1873) shows us a monarch justifying his claim to the throne by enumerating the women of his maternal ancestry. Future historians will no doubt explain the apparent coexistence of two systems of kindred in Egypt. Meanwhile it is noteworthy that Herodotus (ii. 35) declares that daughters were compelled by law to main tain their parents, while sons were free to do as they pleased. This report has been curiously confirmed by the legal documents of certain private Egyptian families, lately deciphered by M. Revillout. We see the woman mistress of the household, and owner of the property. Many other ancient examples are published by the Baron d Eckstein (Revue Archeologique, 1858), but M. d Eckstein s speculations about race need not be accepted. Millar (pp. cit., p. 48) quotes some survivals of the custom of tracing pedigree and deriving condition through women : &quot; If any one be born of a Campanian father, and a mother Futeolan, he is a Campanian citizen, unless, by some jmrticidar custom (privilegio aliyuo), his maternal descent is to be reckoned.&quot; Among places where this local custom ruled, Delphi is mentioned. The great collections of the facts known about the ancient position of women as heads of the family is Bachofen s Das Mutterrecht, in which somewhat crude speculations about religion are -introduced. The most classical example of a tradition of gyneecocracy is that often-quoted tale ofjVarro s preserved by St Augustine (De Civitate Dei, Irtx xviii. c. 9). In the time of Cecrops, the serpent-king, a dispute arose between Pallas and Poseidon, which was settled by the votes of the Athenians. In these days women possessed the franchise, and a woman s vote turned the scale in favour of Pallas. To appease Poseidon, the Athenian men resolved that women should no more be admitted to the assemblies, nor should children take their names from the mother s family. In this tradition survives a memory of the lied Indian and Australian practice, which makes the child belong to tha mother s clan, and also a memory of the political rights, so to speak, which women enjoyed among the ancient Britons, among the Iroquois of Lafitau s time, and which take the shape of a considerable share in the despotism of African races. It maybe said that if women have ever enjoyed these privileges it is odd that among the least cultivated peoples, such as the Australians, they are treated as slaves. The reply is if the Australians were a people of barbaric wealth, like many African nations, and if the cer tainty of succession to the &quot;royal stool&quot; and the royal treasures were a matter of the utmost moment to the state, it is not improbable that the ancient custom^ of ^female kinship would have given, among them too, dignity, import ance, and power to women. Thus we know from several sources that From the nobility of the mother Should always be the right to the sovereignty among the Celts in Scotland (M Lennan, Primitive Marriage, 1865, p. 86, quoting Nennius ; the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, Rolls series, p. 1). Even in the Malm t- harata there is a vestige of this system. Vasouki, the