amily
throws any light on the question of whether the children belong to the
kin of the father rather than of the mother. Where the mother or
mother's brother is the guardian, we are usually safe in assuming that
descent is or has been until recently matrilineal. But from the
undisputed existence of patria potestas no similar inference can be
drawn.

Again, as will be shown below, not even the tie of blood between parent
and child, confined though it may be in the opinion of the people whose
institutions are in question, to a single parent, is an index to the way
in which is determined the kinship organisation to which the child
belongs.

It is therefore clear that the utmost discrimination is necessary in
dealing with these questions; rules of descent must be kept apart from
matters which indeed influence the evolution of the rules but are in no
way decisive as to their form at any given moment.

Returning now to the alleged priority of matrilineal descent in
determining the kinship organisation into which a child passes, it may
be said that whereas evidences of the passage from female to male
reckoning may be observed,[12] there is virtually none of a change in
the opposite direction. In other words, where kinship is reckoned in the
female line, there is no ground for supposing that it was ever
hereditary in any other way. On the other hand, where kinship is
reckoned in the male line, it is frequently not only legitimate but
necessary to conclude that it has succeeded a system of female kinship.
But this clearly does not mean that female descent has in _all_ cases
preceded the reckoning of kinship through males. Patrilineal descent may
have been directly evolved without the intermediate stage of reckoning
through females.

The problem is probably insoluble. No decisive data are available, for
the mere absence of traces of matrilineal descent does not necessarily
prove more than that it had long been superseded by reckoning of kinship
through males. All that can be said is that in the kinship organisations
known to us female descent seems to have prevailed in the vast majority
of cases and probably existed in the residual class of indeterminable
examples.

With patria potestas it is, of course, different. There can be little
doubt that it might and probably did develop in the absence of kinship
organisations and in a state of society where consanguinity is no real
bond after the children have reached puberty. If