first place, by monogamy; secondly, by the dominance of the man within the single family; and thirdly, by the inclusion of three generations under the authority of the oldest member of the family. This third characteristic has frequently caused the typical joint family to be called the '_patriarchal_ family.' Since it was true even of the clan that the older men exercised the decisive influence, the clan may be regarded as preparing the way for a patriarchal order. Such clan alliances, for example, as the Germanic kinship groups, in which the fact of the blood relationship of the members receives particularly strong emphasis, form a sort of transition between the clan and the joint family. In the joint family, it is no longer the older generation as such that is dominant, but the _oldest individual_. This change, as a result of which authority becomes vested in an individual, is paralleled by that which leads to individual rulership within the State. Thus, totemic tribal organization is doubly exposed to disintegration, from below and from above. On the one hand, the patriarchal joint family undermines the leadership of the clan-elders. On the other hand, the clans, together with the tribes whose divisions they form, are shorn of their power; they become fused into one group which, with the rise of political society, passes under the rulership of a single chieftain. It is particularly important to notice that, when the joint family emerges and clan organization is consequently dissolved, one of the most important functions of the more restricted clan alliances, so far as concerns the inner life of society, passes from the clan to the joint family. I refer to _blood-revenge_. Not until it underwent many changes did retribution come to be an affair of the State. Thus, the patriarchal family brings to completion a twofold series of changes, whose gradual beginnings may be discerned as early as the previous age. These are, in the first place, the displacement of maternal descent by _paternal descent_, and, secondly, the development of _chieftainship_. The latter at once concludes and annuls totemic tribal organization. The motives to the former show how untrue to the real nature of the difference between the two social institutions it is to speak of the contrast between mother_-right_ and father_-right_, or even between maternal _rule_ and paternal _rule_, instead of referring to the transition as one from maternal _descent_ to paternal _descent_. Mother-right is to be found at most in a limited sense, as applying to certain rights of the kinship community and, connected with these, at a later time, to the inheritance of property; mother-_rule_ never occurs, or at most is an abnormal and exceptional phenomenon having scarcely any connection with maternal descent as such. The motives to maternal descent, as we have seen, are totally unrelated to the question of dominance within the family; they are the direct result of a separation of the sexes,