Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/174

162. Some of the most instructive of these are too new to have yet found their way into our treatises on early institutions; they are accounts lately published by Dutch officials among the non-Islamized clans of Sumatra and Java. G. A. Wilken, "Over de Verwantschap en bet Huwelijks en Erfrecht bij de Volken van den Indischen Archipel," summarizes the account put on record by Van Hasselt as to the life of the Malays of the Padang Highlands of Mid-Sumatra, who are known to represent an early Malay population. Among these people not only kinship but habitation follows absolutely the female line, so that the numerous dwellers in one great house are all connected by descent from one mother, one generation above another, children, then mothers and maternal uncles and aunts, then grandmothers and maternal great-uncles and great-aunts, etc. There are in each district several suku or mother-clans, between persons born in which marriage is forbidden. Here, then, appear the two well-known rules of female descent and exogamy, but now we come into view of the remarkable state of society, that, though marriage exists, it does not form the household. The woman remains in the maternal house she was born in, and the man remains in his; his position is that of an authorized visitor; if he will, he may come over and help her in the rice-field, but he need not; over the children he has no control whatever, and were he to presume to order or chastise them, their natural guardian, the mother's brother (mamak), would resent it as an affront. The law of female descent and its connected rules have as yet been mostly studied among the native Americans and Australians, where they have evidently undergone much modification. Thus, one hundred and fifty years ago, Father Lafitau mentions that the husband and wife, while in fact moving into one another's hut, or setting up a new one, still kept up the matriarchal idea by the fiction that neither he nor she quitted their own maternal house. But in the Sumatra district just referred to, the matriarchal system may still be seen in actual existence, in a most extreme and probably early form. If, led by such new evidence, we look at the map of the world from this point of view, there discloses itself a remarkable fact of social geography. It is seen that matriarchal exogamous society, that is, society with female descent and prohibition of marriage within the clan, does not crop up here and there, as if it were an isolated invention, but characterizes a whole vast region of the world. If the Malay district be taken as a center, the system of intermarrying mother-clans may be followed westward into Asia, among the Garos and other hill tribes of India. Eastward from the Indian Archipelago it pervades the Melanesian Islands, with remains in Polynesia; it prevails widely in Australia, and stretches north and south in the Americas. This immense district represents an area of lower culture, where matriarchalismmatriarchialism [sic] has only in places yielded to the patriarchal system, which develops with the idea of property, and which, in the other and more civilized half of the