f their mother or her sisters, or their father and his brothers,
but of all the brothers and sisters of their parents without
distinction. While thus the American system of kinship presupposes an
obsolete primitive form of the family, which is still actually existing
in Hawaii, the Hawaiian system on the other hand points to a still more
primitive form of the family, the actual existence of which cannot be
proved any more, but which must have existed, because otherwise such a
system of kinship could not have arisen. According to Morgan, the family
is the active element; it is never stationary, but in progression from a
lower to a higher form in the same measure in which society develops
from a lower to a higher stage. But the systems of kinship are passive.
Only in long intervals they register the progress made by the family in
course of time, and only then are they radically changed, when the
family has done so. "And," adds Marx, "it is the same with political,
juridical, religious and philosophical systems in general." While the
family keeps on growing, the system of kinship becomes ossified. The
latter continues in this state and the family grows beyond it. With the
same certainty which enabled Cuvier to conclude from some bones of
Marsupialia found near Paris that extinct marsupialia had lived there,
with this same certainty may we conclude from a system of kinship
transmitted by history that the extinct form of the family corresponding
to this system was once in existence.

The systems of kinship and forms of the family just mentioned differ
from the present systems in that every child has several fathers and
mothers. Under the American system to which the Hawaiian system
corresponds, brother and sister cannot be father and mother of the same
child; but the Hawaiian system presupposes a family, in which, on the
contrary, this was the rule. We are here confronted by a series of
family forms that are in direct contradiction with those that were
currently regarded as alone prevailing. The conventional conception
knows only monogamy, furthermore polygamy of one man, eventually also
polyandry of one woman. But it passes in silence, as is meet for a
moralizing philistine, that the practice silently but without
compunction supersedes these barriers sanctioned officially by society.
The study of primeval history, however, shows us conditions, where men
practiced polygamy and women at the same time polyandry, so that their