f her own
status; the name which a son applies to his mother, he applies equally
to all the women of her status, whether married or unmarried, in old
age, middle life, youth, or infancy. If there is no term for this
relation we can hardly argue that the absence of terms for other
relations is unthinkable.

Morgan attempted to meet this objection by urging that in a state of
promiscuity a woman would apply the same name to the children of other
women as to her own, because they were or might be by the same father.
But in the first place this assumes that the relationship to the father
was considered rather than the relationship to the mother, and this is
against all analogy. In the second place, even granting Morgan's
postulate, the relation of a mother to her son is not that of a wife to
the children of other wives of a polygynous husband. Poverty of language
is therefore established in this case, and may be taken for granted
where the obvious relationships are concerned.

It has been pointed out more than once that there are grave difficulties
in the way of any hypothesis which assumes that terms of relationship,
properly so called, were evolved in a state of pure promiscuity. It has
now been shown that no intelligible account of the meaning of such terms
can be given, even if we dismiss the difficulties just mentioned and
assume that terms were somehow or other evolved, and a transition
effected to a state of regulated promiscuity. If on the other hand we
regard the "terms of relationship" as originally indicative of tribal
status and suppose they have been transformed in the course of ages into
"descriptive" terms such as we use in everyday life, the difficulties
vanish.

For one proof of this hypothesis we need look no further than the terms
of relationship applied by a mother to her own (and other) children, an
illustration which has already done duty more than once. It is
abundantly clear that what this term expresses is not relationship but
status, the relation of one generation to the next in the Malayan
system, of the half of a generation to the next generation in the same
moiety of the tribe among the Dieri, and so on.

It is admitted even by believers in group marriage that the terms of
relationship do not correspond to anything actually existing; beyond the
"survivals" which we shall consider below, they can produce no shadow of
proof that the terms ever did correspond to actual relationships, as
they u