the two-class system was a common and natural form of evolution
of a society divided into exogamous totem clans with female descent,
when a man was not taken into the clan of the woman with whom he
lived. The further subdivision into four and eight sub-classes is
almost peculiar to the Australian tribes; its development may perhaps
be attributed to the fact that these tribes have retained the system
of female descent and the migratory hunting method of life for an
abnormally long period, and have evolved this special institution
to prevent the unions of near relatives which are likely to occur
under such conditions. The remains of a two-class system appear to
be traceable among the Gonds of the Central Provinces. In one part of
Bastar all the Gond clans are divided into two classes without names,
and a man cannot marry a woman belonging to any clan of his own class,
but must take one from a clan of the other class. Elsewhere the Gonds
are divided into two groups of six-god and seven-god worshippers among
whom the same rule obtains. Formerly the Gonds appear in some places
to have had seven groups, worshipping different numbers of gods from
one to seven, and each of these groups was exogamous. But after the
complete substitution of male for female kinship in the clan, and the
settlement of clans in different villages, the classes cease to fulfil
any useful purpose. They are now disappearing, and it is very difficult
to obtain any reliable information about their rules. The system of
counting kinship through the mother, or female descent, has long been
extinct in the Central Provinces and over most of India. Some survival
of it, or at least the custom of polyandry, is found among the Nairs
of southern India and in Thibet. Elsewhere scarcely a trace remains,
and this was also the condition of things with the classical races of
antiquity; so much so, indeed, that even great thinkers like Sir Henry
Maine and M. Fustel de Coulanges, with the examples only of India,
Greece and Rome before them, did not recognise the system of female
descent, and thought that the exogamous clan with male descent was
an extension of the patriarchal family, this latter having been the
original unit of society. The wide distribution of exogamy and the
probable priority of the system of female to that of male descent were
first brought prominently to notice by Mr. M'Lennan. Still a distinct
trace of the prior form survives here in the special relatio