resembling the south Slavonian house communities.[49] On the other hand, Dargun, the foremost defender of the theory of mother-right, thinks that Bernhöft has "capitulated" too easily.[50] In his last monograph, entitled _Mutterrecht und Vaterrecht_, he maintains essentially the conclusion of his _Mutterrecht und Raubehe_, that before their separation the Aryan people had developed the system of kinship "through the mother as the only or chief basis of blood-relationship" and had "subordinated their entire family law to this principle."[51] But the later treatise contains a very important modification, or perhaps, more justly speaking, extension, of the author's theory. Setting aside as still an open question the general prevalence of promiscuity or sexual communism at the very dawn of distinctively human life, Dargun conceives that, before any system of kinship, maternal or agnatic, became recognized as a principle of customary family law, there must have existed a family, or rather parent-group (_Elterngruppe_), in which the father was protector and master of the mother and her children. This parent-group is the "hypothetical primordial cell of the family," brought together by sexual requirements and the need of sustenance and protection. It is "structureless, devoid of any firm bond, since it rests neither upon the principle of relationship nor that of legalized power." Its resemblance to the patriarchal family, though misleading, "is not without significance." For it "forms the necessary stage of an evolution which in analogous manner is also passed through by property. Inductively it is still demonstrable that individualism and atomism, not communism, as is usually assumed, are the starting point of evolution."[52] As a general rule, according to Dargun, the structureless parent-group is superseded by the maternal family, whose basis is mother-right, or the exclusive legal recognition of blood-relationship in the female line. Only in rare cases does the patriarchal agnatic family follow immediately upon the primitive group, without prior development of mother-right;[53] and hence, under exceptional conditions hindering the rise of the maternal system, do we find a form of the family in which, from a very early period, the house-father is the source of authority, practical or legalized. [45] BACHOFEN, _Das Mutterrecht_; MCLENNAN, _Studies_, I, 121 ff., 195 ff.; _idem_, _Patriarchal Theory_, 50 ff., 71 ff., 96 ff., 120 ff., 250 ff.; DARGUN, _Mutterrecht und Raubehe_, 8, 13, _passim_; GIRAUD-TEULON, _Les orignes du mariage_, 130 ff., 286 ff., 329 ff.; _idem_, _La mère chez certaines peuples de l'antiquité_; LIPPERT, _Geschichte der Familie_, 4 ff.; LUBBOCK, _Origin of Civilization_, 153, 154. KOHLER, "Indisches Ehe- und Familienrecht," _ZVR._, III, 393 ff., holds that the primitive Aryans must necessarily have recognized relationship through the mother. For the literature of this subject see the next chapter.