rther Asia, Africa and
Australia. When, in connection with these investigations and established
facts, the investigation will be everywhere taken up on the sex and
family relations of wild and barbarous nations still living, then will
the fact transpire that, what Bachofen still confusedly found among
numerous peoples of antiquity, and rather surmised than otherwise; what
Morgan found among the Iroquois; what Cunow found among the
Austral-Negros, are but social and sexual formations, that constitute
the _groundwork of human development for all the peoples of the earth_.

The investigations of Morgan bring, moreover, other interesting facts to
light. Although the "pairing family" of the Iroquois starts in
insolvable contradiction with the terms of consanguinity in use among
them, it turns out that, as late as the first half of the 19th Century,
there existed on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) a family-form that
actually tallied with that which, among the Iroquois, existed in name
only. But the system of consanguinity, in force in Hawaii, failed, in
turn, to tally with the family-form actually in existence there. It
referred to an older family-form, one still more primitive, but no
longer extant. There, all the children of brothers and sisters, without
exception, were "brothers" and "sisters." Accordingly, they were not
considered the common children of their mothers and of the sisters of
these, or of their fathers and of the brothers of these, but of all the
brothers and sisters of their parents, without distinction. The Hawaiian
system of consanguinity corresponded, accordingly, with a stage of
development that was lower than the family-form still actually in
existence. Hence transpires the curious fact that, in Hawaii, as with
the Indians of North America, two distinct systems of consanguinity are,
or rather, at a time, were in vogue, which no longer tallied with actual
conditions, but were both overtaken by a higher state. On this head
Morgan says: "The family represents an active principle. It is never
stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society
advances from a lower to a higher condition, and finally passes out of
one form into another of higher grade. Systems of consanguinity, on the
contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long
intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has
radically changed."

The theory,--even to-day generally considered conclusiv