WOMAN OF AMI TRIBE MAKING POTTERY 184 PART I _DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND AND ITS INHABITANTS_ [Illustration: ANTHROPOLOGICAL MAP OF FORMOSA. Scale 1:2,000,000. Heights in feet] CHAPTER I IMPRESSIONS FROM A DISTANCE Scepticism regarding the Existence of a Matriarchate--Glimpse of Formosa from a Steamer’s Deck in passing--Hearsay in Japan concerning the Island Colony--Opportunity of going to Formosa as a Government Official. As to the actual existence of matriarchates I had always been sceptical. Matrilineal tribes, and those matrilocal--that was a different matter. The existence of these among certain primitive peoples had long been substantiated. But that the name should descend in the line of the mother, or that the newly married couple should take up its residence in the tribe or phratry of the bride, has not of necessity meant that the woman held the reins of power. Quite the reverse in many cases, as actual contact with peoples among whom matrilineal and matrilocal customs existed has proved to every practical observer.[1] Those lecturers in the “Woman’s Cause” who boasted of the “great matriarchates of old” I thought weakened, rather than strengthened, the cause they would advocate by attempting to bring to its aid evidence builded on the sands. The great “matriarchates of antiquity” I was inclined to class with the “Golden Age” of the Theosophists, as representing a state of affairs not only “too good to be true,” but one in which the wish was--to paraphrase--father to the belief. And as to prehistoric matriarchates, representing a highly evolved state of civilization--in anything like the present-day significance of that word--I am still sceptical; as sceptical as I am of a Golden Age preceding the day of _Pithecanthropus_ and his kind. But a land which is, as regards its aboriginal inhabitants--now confined to a few tribes, and those fast diminishing, in its more mountainous and inaccessible portions--sufficiently matripotestal to justify its being called a matriarchate, I have found. And this, as is often the case with a quest of any sort, rather by accident. Residence among the American Indians of New Mexico, of Arizona, and of Nevada, and a slight knowledge of the natives of certain of the Pacific Islands--particularly those of Hawaii and of the Philippines--had led me to give up the idea of finding a genuine matriarchate even among primitive peoples. Too often I had found that where those who had “passed by” had spoken of a “matriarchal state” as existing, investigation had proved one that was only matrilineal or matrilocal.