The earliest family group was the clan. As Sir Henry Maine points out in his Ancient Law, the individual was nothing in ancient society, the state was nothing, the family was everything. This statement holds good everywhere, for America as well as for India. A group of clans made up a phratry or brotherhood; a group of phratries made a tribe. This threefold grouping was universal. The Greek phratry, the Roman curia, the Teutonic hundred were analogous institutions. In the clans kinship was always derived through the female line. The _Mutterrecht_ everywhere prevailed.{*} {*} [This subject Mr. Morgan treats with a master’s hand in his Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines.] μήτηρ μεύ τʹ ἐμέ ψησι Του ἑμμεναι ᾶυτὰρ ἐγωγε οὐκ ὀιδ, ὀυ γαρ πώ τις ἐον γόνον ἀυτὸς ἀνέγνω Odyssey, I, 215-6. In that middle stage of barbarism when men began to acquire property, when warriors of valor converted to their uses what had once been common property,--herds of cattle, wives, etc.,--when polygamy became a custom, kinship came to be reckoned through the male line. In this way relationship was mightily changed. But in aboriginal America where domesticated animals were unknown this change did not take place as early as it did elsewhere. In Mexico the change did not probably come much before the century of the Conquest. Kinship was through females only. The exogamous clan (the system which required that the spouse should be taken from another clan) was the unit of the social structure, not the family. House life found expression in architecture. One underlying principle was everywhere apparent--namely, adaptation to communal living. Gradations in culture were evident from the buildings.{*} Thus, the “long house” of the Iroquois, from fifty to one hundred feet long, divided into compartments every six or eight feet, and roughly constructed from timber and bark, betokened very different conditions from those which prevailed among the pueblos of the Zuñi Indians, with their immense structures of adobe and of stone. {*} [This subject Mr. Morgan treats with a master’s hand in his Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines.] In the communal house woman ruled. To her belonged the personal property. Because it was derived through her, this property remained always with the exogamous clan. Thus, marriage made very little difference to woman’s maintenance. If the husband who had come into the house proved to be lazy and otherwise worthless, divorce was easy, and he was sent back to his own. From its own members the clan elected a sachem to attend to civil matters, and a chief to direct its military affairs.