of the chief sources of trouble in the savage world.
With a single interesting exception, the stages in the development
of the law against adultery are exactly the same as in the case already
examined. Whole kins fight about it. Then duelling is substituted.
Then duelling gives way to the ordeal. Then, after the penalty has
long wavered between death and a fine, fines become the rule, so long
as the kins are allowed to settle the matter. If, however, the community
comes to take cognizance of the offence, severer measures ensue. The
one noticeable difference in the two developments is the following.
Whereas murder is an offence against the chief's "majesty," and as
such a criminal offence, adultery, like theft, with which primitive
law is wont to associate it as an offence against property, tends to
remain a purely civil affair. Kafir law, for example, according to
Maclean, draws this distinction very clearly.

It remains to add as regards adultery that, so far, we have only been
considering the punishment that falls on the guilty man. The guilty
woman's fate is a matter relating to a distinct department of primitive
law. Family jurisdiction, as we find it, for instance, in an advanced
community such as ancient Rome, meant the right of the _pater familias_,
the head of the house, to subject his _familia_, or household, which
included his wife, his children (up to a certain age), and his slaves,
to such domestic discipline as he saw fit. Such family jurisdiction
was more or less completely independent of state jurisdiction; and,
indeed, has remained so in Europe until comparatively recent times.

What light, then, does the study of primitive society throw on the
first beginnings of family law as administered by the house-father?
To answer this question at all adequately would involve the writing
of many pages on the evolution of the family. For our present purpose,
all turns on the distinction between the matripotestal and the
patripotestal family. If the man and the woman were left to fight it
out alone, the latter, despite the "shrewish sanction" that she
possesses in her tongue, must inevitably bow to the principle that
might is right. But, as long as marriage is matrilocal--that is to
say, allows the wife to remain at home amongst male defenders of her
own clan--she can safely lord it over her stranger husband; and there
can scarcely be adultery on her part, since she can always obtain
divorce by simply saying, Go! T