Marriage by purchase does not happen to be mentioned in the _Romane Questions_, nor is it necessary to prove what is universally admitted. All that need be remarked here is that purchase was not necessarily preceded by a state of things in which capture prevailed; frequently it may have been a peaceable remedy for the grievances caused by capture, but quite as often it may have been practised side by side with capture from the beginning. Further, the purchase, like the capture, of wives implies that husband and wife belonged to different households; and purchase indicates that the wife thus bought was the property of the husband, or at least that she was subject to him. Let us now turn to the evidence showing that the family was patriarchal and agnatic. The evidence is furnished by the comparative study of law, especially the law regulating the order in which the relatives of a dead man shall succeed to his property. The order of succession prescribed by the earliest legal codes is strikingly similar among all the Aryan peoples; first, the deceased's male descendants to the third generation (his sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons); next, the male descendants of the deceased's father to the third generation (_i.e._, the deceased's brothers, nephews, and grand-nephews); then the male descendants of the deceased's grandfather to the third generation (_i.e._, his uncles, cousins, and their children); and finally, the male descendants of his great-grandfather to the third generation (_i.e._, his great-uncles, his first cousins once removed, and his second cousins once removed). Beyond these degrees, kin was not counted; and if no heir were forthcoming within them, the property went, amongst the Hindoos, to those of the same name as the deceased; amongst the Romans, to the members of his _gens_; in Crete, to the village community. What is the origin of this unanimous and well-marked distinction between the Near and the Remote Kin? Why were the _anchisteis_, "the nearest relations," as the Greeks technically named them, so sharply distinguished from the others?