The idea of a special relationship subsisting between a woman and her children might no doubt be originated during the period when the men of a group, “in the spirit of indifference, indulged in savage promiscuity,”[266] if such a condition of things ever existed, but that alone would not be sufficient to establish kinship through females only. It may be questioned, indeed, whether there ever was a time when the uncertainty of paternity, which Mr. M’Lennan’s whole theory requires, was so pronounced as to prevent kinship through males being acknowledged. Mr. Morgan agrees with Mr. M’Lennan so far as to say that, “prior to the gentile organisation, kinship through females was undoubtedly superior to kinship through males, and was doubtless the principal basis upon which the lower tribal groups were organised.” He affirms truly, however, that “descent in the female line, which is all that ‘kinship through females only’ can possibly indicate,” is only the rule of a gens, and that relationship through the father is recognised as fully as that through the mother.[267] I have elsewhere, however, given reasons for believing that this statement does not go far enough, and that the earliest forms of the classificatory system of relationships, on which Mr. Morgan bases his special theory, require actual kinship, and not relationship merely, through the male quite as fully as through the female. It is surprising that Mr. Morgan says little as to the origin of descent in the female line. He says: “The gens, though a very ancient social organisation founded upon kin, does not include all the descendants of a common ancestor. It was for the reason that, when the gens came in, marriage between single pairs was unknown, and descent through males could not be traced with certainty. Kindred were linked together chiefly through the bond of their maternity.”[268] We have here apparently two reasons stated for the establishment of kinship through females, the absence of marriages between single pairs, and the uncertainty of paternity. Both of these conditions are found by Mr. Morgan to exist in the consanguine family groups which he supposes to have been formed when promiscuity ceased. The Polynesian peoples, among whom he finds traces of the consanguine family, have preserved the recollection of female kinship, although, according to Mr. Morgan, the gens is unknown to them.[269] The classificatory system of relationships, the origin of which he traces to the consanguine family, can, however, receive a totally different interpretation, and the existence of that family itself is very doubtful. Further, the difficulty of tracing descent through males, which Mr. Morgan supposes, is the result only of the polyandrous unions his theory requires, and if they ever really existed they could supply no further explanation of the origin of female kinship than the polyandry of the Nairs. He would have done better to have sought to connect it, as Mr. M’Lennan