As an intermediate stage between monogamy and group-marriage, pure polyandry, it should be remarked, is doubtless a very transitory phenomenon. Nevertheless, it has a priority over polygyny in so far as it first furnishes the motives for the additional practice, and thus for the very origin, of the latter. As a matter of fact, the ethnological distribution of the forms of marriage entirely confirms, as a general rule, the truth of this diagram. Even in Australia the phenomena of Pirrauru and of group-marriage are confined particularly to the southern regions. In the northerly regions, where immigration and racial fusion have played a greater rôle, both monogamy and polygyny may be found. The same is true of America and of Africa, monogamy decidedly predominating in the former and polygyny in the latter. The influence of marriage by purchase then constantly becomes stronger, with the result that the woman comes to be regarded from the point of view of property. The rich man is able to buy more wives than the poor man. In all polygynous countries and fields of culture, therefore, even in the present domain of Islamism, the poor man, as a rule, lives in monogamy, the rich man in polygyny. Only the wealthiest and most aristocratic allow themselves a real harem with a considerable number of wives. Linked with these influences is yet a further change. Its beginnings are to be found as early as Australian culture; in America, it has progressed somewhat farther; in the other regions of totemism, it has finally succeeded in crowding out the original conditions with the exception of meagre remnants and survivals of customs. The change to which I refer is the _transition from maternal descent_, which, in all probability, was originally universal, _to paternal descent_. Maternal descent is in direct harmony with the natural feeling that the children who are born of the mother, and whose early care rests with her alone, should also belong to her. In this sense, mother-right represents the earliest of all conceptions of property. At the same time it precludes the possibility of that marriage which was avoided even by primitive man, and which, on higher cultural levels, is abhorred beyond all the other unions forbidden by the exogamous norms of custom--marriage between son and mother. The decisive external factor in connection with maternal descent, however, is the subordinate position of the family as compared with the association of the age-companions of the same sex, particularly the men's club. Because of its tribal struggles, whose increasing importance is externally reflected in the character of the weapon, it is precisely the totemic era that tends to loosen the natural family ties of the preceding primitive age, and, as a result, to allot the child to the mother. This tendency is clearly expressed in certain transitional phenomena that may occasionally be observed; they occur more frequently in Melanesia and America, however, than in Australia.