produce in more advanced communities.  In the case of the tribe an even feebler bond, the possession of a common language, seems to give the tribesmen a sense of the unity of the tribe, though perhaps other explanations may be suggested, such as the possession in common of the tribal land, or the origin of the tribe from a single blood-related group.  However this may be, it seems reasonable to look for one factor of the first bond of union in the influence of the daily and hourly association of group-mates.  On the other hand, if, as Mr Lang supposes, the original group was a consanguine one, the claims of the factor of consanguinity and perhaps of foster brotherhood and motherhood cannot be neglected.  It may be true, as Dr Frazer argues, that man was originally and still is in some cases ignorant of physiological facts.  But all races of man and a great part of the rest of the animal kingdom show us the phenomena of parental affection, of care for offspring and sometimes of union for their defence.  This does not, it may be noted, imply any predominance of the mother.[11]

We may suppose that the idea of kinship or the recognition of consanguinity, whichever be the more correct term to apply to these far-off developments of the factors of human society, extended only by degrees beyond the limits of the group.  First, perhaps, came the naming of the group, already, it may be, exogamous; then came the recognition of the fact that those members of it, viz. the women, who passed to community B after being born and having resided for years in community A, were in reality, in spite of their change of residence, still in fact the kin of community A; finally came the step of assigning to their children the group names which were retained by their mothers from the original natal groups.  This brings us face to face with the first of the fundamental questions of descent, to which allusion has been made.

It is commonly assumed by students of primitive social organisation that matrilineal descent is the earlier and that it has everywhere preceded patrilineal descent; but the questions involved are highly complicated and it can hardly be said that the subject has been fully discussed.

Much of what has been said on the point has been vitiated by the introduction of foreign factors.  Thus, the child belongs to the tribe of the father where the wife removes to the husband’s local group or tribe.  But though it may be taken as a mark of matrilineal institutions, often associated with matria potestas or its analogue the rule of the mother’s brother, that the husband should remove and live with the wife, we are by no means entitled to say that the removal of the wife to the husband implies a different state of things.  Customs of residence are no guide to the principles on which descent is regulated.  Consequently it is entirely erroneous to import into the discussion with which we are concerned, viz. the rules by which kinship is determined, any considerations based on the rules by which membership of a tribe is settled.