Before leaving the Dakota principle, it seems desirable to allude to two important theoretical problems with which it seems connected--its relations to the Hawaiian principle and its bearing on the antiquity of the clan organization. The Dakota scheme in its more usual form may be logically regarded as merely a complication of the simpler Hawaiian one. As Morgan pointed out, the two coincide in practically half of all the relationships. Inspired no doubt by the general trend of evolutionary thought in his day, Morgan converted the logical connection into an historical sequence and assumed the priority of the simpler system. He indicated how, if grafted on the Hawaiian scheme, the clan or gentile organization would transform it into the Dakota type. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the evolution might have taken place in the reverse direction. Development, as shown precisely by linguistic phenomena, such as the history of the English language--and kinship terms, no matter what else they may be, are elements of human speech--is not always from the simple to the complex. Morgan’s belief was influenced by the view that humanity started their social existence at an extremely low level, for which opinion he found support in the social conditions he inferred from the Hawaiian schedules. These, he argued, suggest brother-sister marriage since such marriages would explain the use of the same term for mother’s brother and father. Such unions certainly _would_ produce the observed terminology but Morgan failed to consider that an alternative explanation was at hand. His fundamental error lay in attaching to the primary kinship terms of the Hawaiians and other peoples the notion of actual cohabitation. From this starting-point he consistently argued that all men addressed as father had actual access to the speaker’s mother. As Cunow has well shown,[52] there is not a tittle of evidence that this represents the native point of view, from which the term ‘father’ merely indicates tribal status with reference to the speaker. When we have once recognized this fact, there is nothing so intrinsically primitive in the Hawaiian scheme of ranging kin as to demonstrate hoary antiquity.