distinguish the primitive group of M’Lennan, although consisting of consanguinei, from a gens or clan proper. Moreover, as Mr. Morgan shows, exogamy has relation to a rule or law of a gens, considered as “the unit of organisation of a social system,” and therefore the gens (of which, as an institution, the rules are prohibition of intermarriage in the gens, and limitation of descent in the female line[259]), or rather the family from which it has sprung, may be regarded as the earliest social group of which we have any knowledge. It is of the greatest importance to the discovery of the nature of the primitive human family to understand the origin of the gens or clan. As defined by Morgan, it is “a body of consanguinei descended from the same common ancestor, distinguished by a gentile name, and bound together by affinities of blood.” Mr. Morgan affirms that the gens originated in three principal conceptions, “the bond of kin, a pure lineage through descent in the female line, and non-intermarriage in the gens.”[260] The most essential feature is that of tracing kinship through females only, and the discovery of the origin of this custom will throw light on that of the clan-institution itself, and therefore on the nature of the primitive family. Mr. M’Lennan finds the origin of kinship through females only in the uncertainty of paternity, arising from the fact that, in primitive times, a woman was not appropriated to a particular man for his wife, or to men of one blood as wife.[261] The children, although belonging to the horde, remain attached to their mothers, and the blood tie observed between them would, as promiscuity gave place to polyandry of the ruder kind in which the husbands are strangers in blood to each other, become developed into the system of kinship through females.[262] An earlier writer, Bachofen, was so much struck with certain social phenomena among the ancients, that he believed women to have, at an early period, been supreme, not only in the family but in the state. He supposed that woman revolted against the primitive condition of promiscuity, and established a system of marriage, in which the female occupied the first place as the head of the family, and as the person through whom kinship was to be traced. This movement, which had a religious origin, was followed by another resulting from the development of the idea that the mother occupied a subordinate position in relation to her children, of whom the father was the true parent. Mr. M’Lennan very justly objects to this theory that, if marriage was, from the beginning, monogamous, kinship would have been traced through fathers from the first.[263] He adds that “those signs of supremacy on the woman’s part were the direct consequences (1) of marriage _not_ being monogamous, or such as to permit of certainty of fatherhood; and (2) of wives not as yet living in their husband’s houses, but apart from them, in the homes of their own mothers.”[264]