That such was the case I have sought to establish elsewhere, as evidenced by the classificatory system of relationships, and that view is confirmed by various facts showing that kinship by the male side is fully recognised among savages. I have already had occasion to refer to Mr. M’Lennan’s admission that, if “marriage was, from its beginning, monogamous, kinship would certainly (human nature being as it now is) have been traced through fathers, if not indeed through fathers only, from the first.”[287] Mr. Herbert Spencer, although apparently thinking that promiscuity in the relations of the sexes was originally extensive, yet supposes that it was accompanied by monogamic connections of a limited duration. He says that “always the state of having two wives must be preceded by the state of having one,” and he looks upon the preference for the maternal kinship rather than paternal kinship as a habit, arising from the fact that the former is observed in all cases, whilst the latter is inferable only in some cases.[288] Mr. Spencer’s admission that where the system of female kinship now subsists, “male parentage is habitually known, though disregarded,” greatly weakens his position, the more so as we are not told why or when it is disregarded.[289] Mr. Morgan goes far towards supplying an explanation of the fact, although his theory is defective. He affirms that gentile kin were superior to other kin only because it conferred the rights and privileges of a gens, and not because no other kin was recognised. “Whether in or out of the gens, a brother was recognised as a brother, a father as a father, a son as a son, and the same term was applied in either case without discrimination between them.”[290] Mr. Morgan does not, however, admit of certainty of paternity, although he states that “they did not reject kinship through males because of uncertainty, but gave the benefit of the doubt to a number of persons—probable fathers being placed in the category of real fathers, probable brothers in that of real brothers, and probable sons in that of real sons.”[291] This explanation is plausible but insufficient, if, as Mr. Morgan says, descent in the female line is only a rule of a gens.[292] In this case, female descent cannot have existed before the gens, and recognition of kinship through the father may have subsisted prior to the formation of the gens, together with that of the relationship between mother and child on which such descent is founded. This would seem to be required by the facts mentioned by Mr. Morgan in relation to the social institutions of the American aborigines. He says “an Indian tribe is composed of several gentes developed from two or more, all the members of which are intermingled by marriage, and all of them speak the same dialect. To a stranger the tribe is visible and not the gens.”[293] Originally, therefore, the tribe consisted of two gentes, that is of the descendants from two female common ancestors, and, as the