Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/320

 men succeeded in constructing genealogical trees, or even in determining with any precision the degrees of consanguinity. Not only does the father not stand out as a principal personage from the background of the familial clan; he has not even yet any recognised social existence in the little group; in short, the actual physiological father has had in principle no ascertainable relationship with his children, for marriage was anything but monandric.

Within the primitive social unit, the familial clan, every one was consanguine, but in a confused way; the wives had several husbands, and the husbands several wives; the degrees of kinship were not individual, but applied to classes of individuals. At this period of social development it was difficult to distinguish as yet the real from the possible, fictitious consanguinity from real consanguinity. Every one had groups of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters: filiation and the true ties of consanguinity in numerous cases could not be discerned.

In these groups of consanguine individuals, these clans with kinship still confused, the first thing that became most habitually differentiated was not the paternal family, for that could scarcely exist, seeing that the father of a child was not easy to designate; it was the maternal family, which we will now proceed to examine.