A modern French writer of great authority, Fustel de Coulanges, affirms that the ancient family was constituted chiefly by religion, the first institution of which was marriage. The family gives rise to the gens, and “with its elder and younger branches, its servants and dependents, formed possibly a very numerous group of persons.” Such a family, says de Coulanges, “thanks to the religion which maintained its unity, thanks to its special privileges which rendered it indivisible, thanks to the laws of protection which retained its dependents, formed in time a widespread society under an hereditary chief.”[296] This view of the primitive family possesses much truth, although it leaves out of sight one of the most essential features of the family among uncultured peoples. The same may be said in relation to the patriarchal family of Sir Henry Maine. This writer says that “the earliest tie which knitted men together in communities was consanguinity or kinship,” and that “there was no brotherhood recognised by our savage forefathers, except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact.”[297] He adds, that “kinship, as the tie, binding communities together, tends to be regarded as the same thing with subjection to a common authority.” The notions of power and consanguinity are blended, a mixture of ideas which is seen “in the subjection of the smallest group, the family, to its patriarchal head.”[298] “This group,” says Sir Henry Maine, “consists of animate and inanimate property, of wife, children, slaves, land and goods, all held together by subjection to the despotic authority of the eldest male of the eldest ascending line, the father, grandfather, or even more remote ancestor. The force which binds the group together is power. A child adopted into the patriarchal family belongs to it as perfectly as the child naturally born into it, and a child who severs his connection with it is lost to it altogether.” The patriarchal family of Maine thus differs from the ancient family of de Coulanges in its binding force, which in the one case is power, and in the other religion, forces which are, nevertheless, reconciled by the fact that the chief element in this religion is the ancestral idea which is at the base of the patriarchal family. This view of the nature of the ancient family would be complete if it provided for the fact, revealed by the study of primitive institutions as now exhibited among uncultured peoples, that descent was originally traced by the female line in preference to the male line. The defect thus revealed will, however, be removed if it can be shown, as I have endeavoured to do, that descent through the male is, for certain purposes, recognised equally with that through the female. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his “Principles of Sociology,” refers,[299] as follows, to a suggestion made by Mr. Fiske, which contains an important truth bearing on the subject of this paper: “Postulating the general law