In my sketch of the family in the animal kingdom, I have already had occasion to remark that the family, such as we understand it, is not indispensable to the maintenance of societies, since the ants do without it in their republics, in which we find neither paternity nor maternity, in the sense we attach to them, but simply three classes of individuals, the breeders, the young, and the educators. With these last, the working ants, by a paradoxical contradiction, maternal love has survived the atrophy of the generative function; it is even purified and widened, for it is lavished without partiality on all the young ones, which form the hope of the republic; and though thus diluted, it seems to have lost none of its energy. Nothing at all similar is seen in inferior human societies, but the family is still, however, in a confused state; paternity, in the social sense of the word, does not exist; filiation is especially maternal, but the actual degrees of consanguinity are not well distinguished in detail; parenthood is not yet individual, but is constituted in groups. In the present day we may still study this familial confusion in certain Australian tribes. We have seen that marriage, or what goes by that name, resulted in Tasmania, Australia, Bali, etc., from a violent and brutal rape, generally ratified by a compensation and a simulation of retaliation between the tribe of the woman and that of the ravisher. Among the least savage tribes of Melanesia, this rape is often fictitious, in which case it is no more than a survival; but sometimes it is still real, and it surely must always have been so at the origin of the Australian societies. But however gross these societies may be, they are none the less the result of a long evolution. In the interior of Borneo there are still existing human beings compared with whom the Australians are civilised people. These absolutely primitive savages of Borneo are probably the remains of negroïd peoples, who must formerly have been the first inhabitants of Malaya. They roam the forests in little hordes, like monkeys; the man, or rather the male, carries off the female and couples with her in the thickets. The family passes the night under a large tree; the children are suspended from the branches in a sort of net, and a great fire is lighted at the foot of the tree to keep off the wild beasts. As soon as the children are capable of taking care of themselves, the parents turn them adrift as animals do.[873]