y. And I
believe that those of my readers who will follow out an investigation
for themselves in any direction--either in the collecting of maternal
customs among existing primitive peoples, or in noting the relics of
such customs to be met with in historical records and in folk-lore,
will find an ever increasing store of evidence, and that then the
discredited mother-age, with its mother-right customs, will become for
them what it is for me, a necessary and accepted stage in the
evolution of human societies.

Many of the conclusions to which I have come are so completely opposed
to those which generally have been accepted as correct, that now, I am
at the end of my inquiry it will be well to sum up briefly its result.

The facts I have so rapidly enumerated have a very wide bearing; they
serve to destroy the accepted foundations on which the claim for
mother-right has hitherto been based. The first stage of the family
was patriarchal. All the evidence we possess tends to show that
tracing descent through the mother was not the primitive custom.
Throughout my aim has been to bring into uniformity the opposing
theories of the primeval patriarchate and the maternal family. The
current view, so often asserted, and manifestly inspired by a
Puritanical ideal, insists that mother-descent arose through uncertain
fatherhood, and was connected with an early period of promiscuous
relationships between the two sexes. This view has been proved to be
entirely wrong. The system of maternal descent was a system framed for
order, and had in its origin, at least, no connection with sexual
disorder. Further than this, it is certain that marriage in some form
has always existed, and that the sexual relationships have never been
unregulated. We must renounce any theory of primitive promiscuity.
And there is more than this to be said. Such freedom in love and in
marriage as we do find in barbarous societies is so strong a proof of
friendly feeling and security that it is certain it could not have
existed in the first stage of the jealous patriarchate; rather it must
have developed at a subsequent period with the growth of the
social-tribal spirit, and the liberty of women from the thrall of
sexual ownership. In these particulars my opinion differs from all
other writers who have sought to establish a theory of matriarchy. I
venture to claim that the position of the mother-age has been
strengthened, and, as I hope, built up on surer founda