(M174) Another instance of the same cause producing the same effect may be drawn from the institutions of the Pelew Islanders, which have been described by an accurate observer long resident in the islands. These people, who form a branch of the Micronesian stock, are divided into a series of exogamous families or clans with descent in the female line,(509) so that, as usually happens under such a system, a man’s heirs are not his own children but the children of his sister or of his maternal aunt.(510) Every family or clan traces its descent from a woman, the common mother of the whole kin,(511) and accordingly the members of the clan worship a goddess, not a god.(512) These families or clans, with female descent and a worship of goddesses rather than of gods, are grouped together in villages, each village comprising about a score of clans and forming with its lands a petty independent state.(513) Every such village-state has its special deity or deities, generally a god and a goddess. But these political deities of the villages are said to be directly derived from the domestic deities of the families or clans,(514) from which it seems to follow that among these people gods are historically later than goddesses and have been developed out of them.(515) The late origin of the gods as compared with the goddesses is further indicated by the nature of their names.(516) (M175) This preference for goddesses over gods in the clans of the Pelew Islanders has been explained, no doubt rightly, by the high importance of women in the social system of the people.(517) For the existence of the clan depends entirely on the life of the women, not at all upon the life of the men. If the women survive, it is no matter though every man of the clan should perish; for the women will, as usual, marry men of another clan, and their offspring will inherit their mother’s clan, thereby prolonging its existence. Whereas if the women of the clan all die out, the clan necessarily becomes extinct, even though every man of it should survive; for the men must, as usual, marry women of another clan, and their offspring will inherit their mothers’ clan, not the clan of their fathers, which accordingly, with the death of the fathers, is wiped out from the community. Hence in these islands women bear the titles of _Adhalál a pelú_, “Mothers of the Land,” and _Adhalál a blay_, “Mothers of the Clan,” and they are said to enjoy complete equality with the men in every respect.(518) Indeed, in one passage our principal authority speaks of “the predominance of feminine influence in the social condition of the people,” and asserts without qualification that the women are politically and socially superior to the men.(519) The eldest women of the clan exercise, he tells us, the most decisive influence on the conduct of its affairs, and the headman does nothing without full consultation with them, a consultation which in the great houses extends to affairs of state and