Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/302

 between all the members of his horde. In these little primitive groups, no distinction has at first been made between real and fictitious kinship. All the men of the same clan have been brothers, all the women have been sisters, and by the help of an inveterate habit of exogamy, a gross morality has been formed, which condemned social incest. But as the life of the clan was, before all things, communal, while marriages within the clan were prohibited, it was decided that the clans of the same name—that is, those who had sprung one from the other—should be united by a sort of social marriage, all the women of the one being common to all the men of the other. Then, in the course of time, the instinct of individual appropriation having undermined the primitive community, the women were distributed amongst the men; they formed families which were often singular ones, and of which I shall have to speak again. There was no longer promiscuity from clan to clan, but the wife was to be taken from an allied clan. The first filiation which was established was surely maternal filiation: primitive conjugal confusion would not permit of any other. But at length, when the family became more or less instituted, the relations could be classified, and the degrees of consanguinity distinguished.

It was not without difficulty that man succeeded so far. A long period of time was required to disentangle the skein of family relationships; and fictitious kinship continued to be confounded with real kinship for many ages. Change came only by a slow evolution, which we will now proceed to study.