psychically fitted to establish it--man could never have instituted monogamy--she was not equally fitted to render it permanent. Woman is not born to rule. In intelligence, as well as in physical strength, she is inferior to man. Altogether, therefore, there are three periods of development: agamy or promiscuity, followed by female supremacy or mother-right, and, finally, by the dominance of man, or father-right. These hypotheses of Bachofen created much dispute in succeeding years. Some of the facts could not be denied from the standpoint of the antiquarian. Nevertheless, the supposition of the universality of an early mother-right was quite rightly questioned, and its origin out of the completely unrestrained condition of the horde was even more vigorously contested. And so the theory of the Swiss jurist, which was based essentially on philologic-antiquarian arguments, gradually fell into the background, until, in the seventies of the nineteenth century, it suddenly seemed to find important corroboration and a new basis from an entirely different quarter. It was ethnology that supplied the new facts, and these were again derived from a study of Australia, that field of ethnological observation which was generally regarded as more particularly exemplifying primitive culture. Bachofen believed to have demonstrated that maternal descent was originally a universal custom, even in the case of those who are now cultural peoples. Ethnology revealed the fact that this system of kinship is still very prevalent in Australia. Indeed, it is so prevalent that even to-day about three-fifths of the tribes trace descent through the mother and only two-fifths through the father. In some of the cases in which the system of paternal descent is now established, moreover, it is probable that the mother once determined the kinship of the children. It was on the basis of these facts that, in his volume on the natives of south-eastern Australia, Howitt, the most thorough investigator of the social conditions of the Australians, came to a conclusion similar to that previously reached by Bachofen on the basis of his antiquarian investigations. In Howitt's view, all family relations were originally based on the system of maternal descent. This system, though generally restricted to narrower bounds than in Australia, is likewise to be found in America, Melanesia, Polynesia, and in several parts of the Old World, especially among the peoples of northern Siberia and among the Dravidian tribes in the southern part of Hindustan. These facts have more and more led present-day ethnologists to a view that is in essential agreement with Bachofen's theory. Again the question was raised how such a system of maternal descent was possible. The answer was that it could be possible only if the mother, but not the father, was known to son and daughter--again an analogical conclusion from conditions prevailing in present-day society outside the marriage tie.