systems of political control growing
out of achievement. This involves a social history through which these
low tribes have not passed.

Organization cannot proceed very far in the absence of social mass,
and the collection of social mass took place unconsciously about the
female as a universal preliminary of the conscious synthetization of
the mass through males. From the side of organization, the negative
accretion of population about female centers and filiation through
blood is very precious, since filiation based on relation to females
prepares the way for organization based on motor activities.[122]
But in the prematernal stage, in the maternal stage, and in the
patriarchal stage the male force was present and was the carrier
of the social will. In the fully maternal system, indeed, the male
authority is only thinly veiled, or not at all. Filiation through
female descent precedes filiation through achievement, because it is
a function of somatic conditions, in the main, while filiation through
achievement is a function of historical conditions. This advantage of
maternal organization in point of time embarrasses and obscures the
individual and collective expression of the male force, but under
the veil of female nomenclature and in the midst of the female
organization we can always detect the presence of the male authority.
Bachofen's conception of the maternal system as a political system was
erroneous, as Dargun and others have pointed out,[123] though woman
has been reinforced by the fact of descent, and has so figured
somewhat in political systems.

A most instructive example of the parallel existence of descent
through females and of male authority is found in the Wyandot tribe
of Indians, in which also the participation of woman in the regulative
activities of society is, perhaps, more systematically developed than
in any other single case among maternal peoples. Major Powell gives
the following outline of the civil and military government of this
tribe:

The civil government inheres in a system of councils and
chiefs. In each gens there is a council, composed of four
women, called _Yu-wai-yu-wa-na_. These four women councilors
select a chief of the gens from its male members--that is,
from their brothers and sons. This gentile chief is the head
of the gentile council. The council of the tribe is composed
of the aggregated gentile councils. The tribal council,
therefore,