During late years the meaning of the word “Berber” has become considerably widened. We are now inclined to consider as varieties of the same very old race the men of Cro-Magnon, the ancient inhabitants of the cave of Mentone, the ancient Vascons, the Cantabrians, Iberians, Guanchos, Kabyles, Berbers, and Touaregs, etc. All these peoples are thought to belong to one great human type, which we may call Berber, and of which numerous representatives still exist. Anterior to all Asiatic migration, and from the time of the stone age, this race seems to have occupied the south of Gaul and Spain, the Canary Isles, and Northern Africa. At the present day the most important epigonic groups of the Berber race are the Kabyles and the Touaregs of the Sahara. Several writers of antiquity have told us how the family of the ancient Berbers was formerly instituted, and we know _de visu_ what it is among contemporary Berbers. We are therefore able to give a rough outline of it. The general characteristics of the Berber family seem to have been a privileged position accorded to women and maternal filiation, with tendencies even to the matriarchate. Speaking of the Cantabrians, Strabo writes: “Among the Cantabrians usage requires that the husband shall bring a dower to his wife, and the daughters inherit, being charged with the marriage of their brothers, which constitutes a kind of gynecocracy.”[1057] The word gynecocracy is surely too strong. We have here probably an account of a custom which still exists in Japan, and which existed quite recently in Basque countries, that of leaving to the first-born, whether boy or girl, the administration of the inalienable patrimony of the family, and of obliging his or her wedded partner to take the name and abode of the family. This is what M. le Play has formerly called the family-stock; but this family-stock may, and doubtless must, have co-existed primitively with maternal filiation.