The granaries, in which the year’s harvest of millet is stored, are also under the charge of women, who deal out daily supplies of millet to the women of the different families comprising the tribal group. It seems tabu for men, certainly of the Taiyal tribe, to approach very near these millet store-houses. To just what cause the women of the Formosan aborigines owe their ascendancy it would be difficult to say. As a people the aborigines have reached the stage of “hoe-culture”--a stage which Deniker and some other anthropologists sharply differentiate from “true agriculture” (i.e. with the plough), and which usually precedes the pastoral stage, whereas “true agriculture” follows it. Certainly this precedence of order of culture is true of the Formosans (the aborigines). They have no flocks or herds, no beasts of draught or of burden; they are strictly in the “hunting stage” of civilization as regards the men; yet the women scratch the ground with a short-handled primitive hoe, and thus raise millet and sweet potatoes, besides digging away the rankest of the weeds from about the roots of the tobacco plants. Whether being concerned with the raising and storing of the staples of life--millet and sweet potatoes--and with the gathering and curing of the tobacco-leaves and the making of wine--life’s luxuries--has given women the ascendancy which they undoubtedly possess is a question. Personally I should be inclined to think it had (on the principle that he who holds the purse-strings--or the equivalent--holds the power). But Lowie, the American anthropologist, with some force of argument, warns of the danger of too hastily assuming that an agricultural stage (“hoe-culture” or other) of civilization necessarily implies “matri-potestas,” pointing out the fact that among the Andaman Islanders, who are in the most primitive “hunting stage,” women hold a far higher position than among the present agricultural peoples of India and of many other parts of the world.[61] It may be that the “equal rights” (or superior rights) position of the aboriginal women of Formosa is due to causes partly racial, for in Guam, an island of the Marianne, or Ladrone, group also inhabited by a people evidently of Indonesian extraction, the same state of affairs seems to exist as regards the relation of the sexes. In Formosa this certainly is not due to contact with a superior race, for among both Chinese and Japanese--as is generally known--the woman is regarded as being distinctly inferior to him who is with these races very literally “lord and master.”