otherhood and motherhood cannot be
neglected. It may be true, as Dr Frazer argues, that man was originally
and still is in some cases ignorant of physiological facts. But all
races of man and a great part of the rest of the animal kingdom show us
the phenomena of parental affection, of care for offspring and sometimes
of union for their defence. This does not, it may be noted, imply any
predominance of the mother.[11]

We may suppose that the idea of kinship or the recognition of
consanguinity, whichever be the more correct term to apply to these
far-off developments of the factors of human society, extended only by
degrees beyond the limits of the group. First, perhaps, came the naming
of the group, already, it may be, exogamous; then came the recognition
of the fact that those members of it, viz. the women, who passed to
community B after being born and having resided for years in community
A, were in reality, in spite of their change of residence, still in fact
the kin of community A; finally came the step of assigning to their
children the group names which were retained by their mothers from the
original natal groups. This brings us face to face with the first of the
fundamental questions of descent, to which allusion has been made.

It is commonly assumed by students of primitive social organisation that
matrilineal descent is the earlier and that it has everywhere preceded
patrilineal descent; but the questions involved are highly complicated
and it can hardly be said that the subject has been fully discussed.

Much of what has been said on the point has been vitiated by the
introduction of foreign factors. Thus, the child belongs to the tribe of
the father where the wife removes to the husband's local group or tribe.
But though it may be taken as a mark of matrilineal institutions, often
associated with matria potestas or its analogue the rule of the mother's
brother, that the husband should remove and live with the wife, we are
by no means entitled to say that the removal of the wife to the husband
implies a different state of things. Customs of residence are no guide
to the principles on which descent is regulated. Consequently it is
entirely erroneous to import into the discussion with which we are
concerned, viz. the rules by which _kinship_ is determined, any
considerations based on the rules by which membership of a _tribe_ is
settled.

Similarly, no proof of the existence of paternal authority in the f