And first it should be noted that the history of human parenthood from its earliest known appearance shows an orderly progress from the start to the end. There is no difficulty even in fixing the beginning. Man, the gorilla, the orang and the chimpanzee had a common ancestor, and for this reason the parental stages of the great apes and of man have an almost startling resemblance. Professor Metchnikoff was so impressed by this likeness that he has suggested that the human race may have taken its origin from the precocious birth of an ape. We thus find no gap that has to be filled: we take up our inquiry of the family at the exact place at which we left it. There are, of course, changes to fit the parents and the young for their new stage of life; more and more instincts are modified by experiment and experience. Intelligence grows. New habits afford possibilities of advance, and suggest the directions in which the family may move. There are, however, far fewer experiments, less sharp differences in the conduct of the different parents; the family shows less flexibility, and the maternal instincts settle down, as it were, to an average character, with average limitations and an average expression. Our most primitive ancestors, half-men, half-brutes, lived in small, solitary, and hostile family groups, composed of an adult male, his wife, or, if he were powerful, several wives and their children. In such a group the father is the chief or patriarch as long as he lives, and the family is held together by their common subjection to him. His interest in the family is confined to fighting to drive off rivals, and, for this reason, he drives his sons from the home as soon as they are old enough to be dangerous to his interests: his daughters he adds to his wives, unless they are caught and carried off by some other male. It was doubtless thus, in a family organisation similar to that of the great monkeys, that man first lived. Here was the most primitive form of jealous government of the family by the male. Such conduct, prompted by the egoistic desires of sex, mark the continuation of the degradation in fatherhood, which we noted as occurring among the mammals as soon as the father was freed from the duties of providing a home and the first feeding and tending of the young. In the primitive families the idea of descent is feeble so that the groups are small and readily disrupted. But though originally without explicit consciousness of relationships, the members would be held together by a _feeling_ of kin. Such feeling would become conscious first between the mothers and their children, and in this way mother-kin must have been realised at a very early period. The father’s relationship, on the other hand, would not be forced into conscious recognition. He would be a member apart from this natural kinship.