ved female lineage. Even a survival of the Punaluan family had
been preserved among the Scots, as among the Welsh. For until the middle
ages, the chief of the clan or king, the last representatives of the
former common husbands, had the right to claim the first night with
every bride, unless a ransom was given.

It is an indisputable fact, that the Germans were organized in gentes
up to the time of the great migrations. The territory between the
Danube, the Rhine, the Vistula and the northern seas was evidently
occupied by them only a few centuries before Christ. The Cimbri and
Teutons were then still in full migration, and the Suebi did not settle
down until Cesar's time. Cesar expressly states that they settled down
in gentes and kins (gentibus cognatibusque), and in the mouth of a Roman
of the gens Julia this term gentibus has a definite meaning, that no
amount of disputation can obliterate. This holds good for all Germans.
It seems that even the provinces taken by them from the Romans were
settled by distribution to gentes. The Alemanian code of laws affirms
that the people settled in gentes (genealogiae) on the conquered land
south of the Danube. Genealogia is used in exactly the same sense as was
later on Mark--or Dorfgenossenschaft (mark or village community).
Kovalevsky recently maintained that these genealogiae were the great
household communities among which the land was divided, and from which
the village communities developed later on. The same may be true of the
fara, by which term the Burgundians and Langobards--a Gothic and a
Herminonian or High German tribe--designated nearly, if not exactly, the
same thing as the Alemanian genealogiae. Whether this is really the gens
or the household community, must be settled by further investigation.

The language records leave us in doubt, whether all the Germans had a
common expression for gens or not, and as to what this term was.
Etymologically, the Gothic, kuni, middle High German kuenne, corresponds
to the Grecian genos and the Latin gens, and is used in the same sense.
We are led back to the time of matriarchy by the terms for "woman" which
are derived from the same root: Greek gyne, Slav zena, Gothic qvino,
Norse kona, kuna.

Among Langobards and Burgundians, I repeat, we find the term fara which
Grimm derives from the hypothetical root fisan, to beget. I should
prefer to trace it to the more obvious root faran, German fahren, to
ride or to wander, in order