l husbands,
their natural brothers excepted. These men now no longer addressed one
another as "brother"--which they no longer had to be--but as "Punalua,"
i. e., intimate companion, associate as it were. Likewise a series of
natural or more remote brothers lived in mutual marriage with a number
of women, not their natural sisters, and these women referred to each
other as "Punalua." This is the classical form of a family, which later
admitted of certain variations. Its fundamental characteristic was
mutual community of husbands and wives within a given family with the
exclusion of the natural brothers (or sisters) first, and of the more
remote grades later.

This form of the family, now, furnishes with complete accuracy the
degrees of kinship expressed by the American system. The children of the
sisters of my mother still are her children; likewise the children of
the brothers of my father still his children; and all of them are my
brothers and sisters. But the children of the brothers of my mother are
now her nephews and nieces, the children of the sisters of my father
his nephew and nieces, and they are all my cousins. For while the
husbands of the sisters of my mother are still her husbands, and
likewise the wives of the brothers of my father still his
wives--legally, if not always in fact--the social proscription of sexual
intercourse between brothers and sisters has now divided those relatives
who were formerly regarded without distinction as brothers and sisters,
into two classes. In one category are those who remain (more remote)
brothers and sisters as before; in the other the children of the brother
on one hand or the sister on the opposite, who can be brothers and
sisters no longer. The latter have mutual parents no more, neither
father nor mother nor both together. And for this reason the class of
nephews and nieces, male and female cousins, here becomes necessary for
the first time. Under the former family order this would have been
absurd. The American system of kinship, which appears absolutely
paradoxical in any family form founded on monogamy, is rationally
explained and naturally confirmed in its most minute details by the
Punaluan family. Wherever this system of kinship was in force, there the
Punaluan family or at least a form akin to it must also have existed.

This family form, the existence of which in Hawaii was actually
demonstrated, would have been transmitted probably by all Polynesia, if
the