The Indians of Guatemala were unacquainted with maternal kinship. They willingly married their sisters, provided they were not children of the same father, and among them the children belonged to the class of the father even when the mother was a slave.[954] Among the Mayas descent was also reckoned in the male line.[955] In various savage tribes of Mexico the women did not inherit. Among the Ityas and in Yucatan the name of the child was formed by combining the names of the father and mother; the mother’s name, however, had the precedence.[956] The monk Thevet relates that the Indians of Brazil already pushed the agnatic system, at least in theory, to its most extreme limits; for they affirmed, he says, that in procreation the part of the father is predominant, and that of the mother only secondary.[957] The general conclusion to be drawn from these very dissimilar facts is, that we should abstain from forming any absolute theories on these great sociological questions of marriage and the family, which are still so far from being elucidated. III. _The Family in Polynesia._ Filiation by the female line seems to be generally adopted, not only in Polynesia, but in many Melanesian or Micronesian archipelagoes. It has been found in the Fiji Islands, at Tonga and the Carolines,[958] etc. But exogamy, even the exogamy of the clan, after the American fashion, appears rare. It existed at Samoa, but in any case it seems not to have been a general custom.[959] In New Zealand endogamy predominated, and marriage with a woman of another tribe was even prohibited, unless an important political motive could be given as an excuse.[960] Endogamy was also practised in the Hawaian Islands. In the Mulgrave Islands every marriage required the sanction of an assembly of all the friends and relatives, or rather of the whole clan,[961] for the interest of the community was involved in it.