go back to a distant epoch, when brothers had their wives in common, but abstained from marrying their own sisters. This supposition is confirmed by the examination of the collateral ascending kinship. Thus, either in the case of a man or woman, the father’s brother, or the paternal uncle, is reckoned as the father, and his sons and daughters are reckoned as brothers and sisters. The sisters of the father, or of any person bearing the title of father, are called aunts. The children of these aunts are cousins. For a man, the kinship of uncle is restricted to the brothers of the mother, and the children of these uncles are cousins. The mother’s sister, or the maternal aunt, is counted as a mother; her children are not nephews and nieces, but sons and daughters. All sisters, real or fictitious, are mutually mothers of all their children. The children of a man’s brothers are not his nephews and nieces, but his sons and daughters; his sisters’ children are his nephews and nieces,[933] probably because these names have been given at an epoch when the brothers married groups of sisters in common, but not their own sisters. The Omaha Redskins distinguish the degrees of kinship almost in the same way as the Iroquois Senecas. For them also the most distant ascendants are all grandfathers or grandmothers. They class all their relations in groups, formed of individuals virtually brought together by similar degrees of consanguinity or alliance. Whole categories of individuals, more or less numerous, are called brothers or fathers of a man or woman; all those whom the father of a person calls brothers are fathers to that person; all those whom the mother of a woman calls husbands are also fathers to that woman. The name “mother” is given to all the women reputed as sisters to the mother, to the aunts or nieces of the mother, and also to the virtual wives of the father. A man has virtually for wives all the wives of his brothers, and also their widows, on account of the levirate. If a man has a brother-in-law who is at the same time the husband of a paternal aunt, the sister of that man is the grand-daughter of the brother-in-law. A man becomes your brother-in-law if he is merely the husband of a paternal aunt, because he can marry your sister. The husband of a daughter, of a niece, or of a grand-daughter, is a son-in-law.[934] All the sons and all the daughters of persons reputed as fathers and mothers call each other brothers and sisters. All the wives, real or virtual, of the grandfather are called grandmothers; so are also all the mothers or grandmothers of the fathers and mothers, and all the women that the fathers and mothers call sisters.