Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/27

Rh more proofs were found that among undeveloped nations there were connubial forms in which a group of men possessed a group of women. Lubbock in his "Origin of Civilization" (1870) recognized this "communal marriage" as a historical fact.

Immediately after him, in 1871, Morgan appeared with fresh and, in many respects, conclusive material. He had convinced himself that the peculiar system of kinship in vogue among the Iroquois was common to all the aborigines of the United States, and practised all over the continent, although it was in direct contradiction with all the degrees of relation arising from the connubial system in practice there. He prevailed on the federal government to collect information on the systems of kinship of other nations by the help of question blanks and tables drawn up by himself. The answers brought the following results:

1. The kinship system of the American Indians is also in vogue in Asia, and in a somewhat modified form among numerous tribes of Africa and Australia.

2. This system finds a complete explanation in a certain form of communal marriage now in process of decline in Hawaii and some Australian islands.

3. By the side of this marital form, there is in practice on the same islands a system of kinship only explicable by a still more primeval and now extinct form of communal marriage.

The collected data and the conclusions of Morgan were published in his "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity," 1871, and discussion transferred to a far more extensive field. Taking his departure from the system of affinity he reconstructed the corresponding forms of the family, thereby opening a new road to scientific investigation and extending the retrospective view into prehistoric periods of human life. Once this view gained