The terms still in use with them to designate kinship recall the former existence of a fraternal marriage; but in practice they have none the less adopted individual marriage. The manner in which these individual marriages are contracted probably indicates what must have happened in primitive times, when some innovators attempted to escape from tribal marriage by carrying off the women they preferred, and were only re-admitted to their tribe after having obtained pardon and the ratification of their audacious enterprise. Among the Kurnai every marriage must be made by the capture of one of the women of their tribe, even when this rape has been preceded by a friendly exchange of sisters, which is usual enough. This simulated rape is punished by a simulation of vengeance. The fugitives are pursued; they are even ill-treated, but short of being actually killed. Their punishment is simply an act of obedience to ancestral customs. When all is concluded, and the fugitive couple reinstated among their people, the woman belongs to the man who has carried her off; he is no longer obliged to offer her to the visitors of his clan, as old Australian hospitality required;[885] she belongs to him alone. Sometimes the ravisher legalises his right of sole proprietor by first giving notice to his friends, and offering them the use of his wife, after which he can keep her to himself.[886] In proportion as tribal marriage was being transformed, owing to the breaches made in it by individual instinct, the consanguineous family was gradually arising in place of the collective and fictitious family. It seems most likely that uterine filiation, or the maternal family, was first established. The Australian Motas still have filiation by the woman’s side, and among them the property of the uncle is transmitted to the uterine nephew; but already the paternal family is beginning to be constituted, and the relatives on the male side seek to redeem the heritage by means of an indemnity.[887] With other and more advanced Australian tribes, fanatical evolution is more complete; masculine filiation is already instituted, and agnation adopted; there is even a worship of the manes of male ancestors.[888] The Melanesians of Australia and Tasmania present, therefore, a tolerably complete picture of the evolution of marriage and of the family, from the primitive rape, followed by a tribal period in which marriage is merely a limited and regulated promiscuity, and in which real consanguinity is replaced by a fictitious fraternity, down to the _régime_ of individual marriage and masculine filiation, previously passing through uterine filiation, or the maternal family. We shall find traces of this evolution among other races, but nowhere is the lower stage so well preserved as in Australia. III. _The Family in America._