The same principle explains how it happens that a maternal uncle is almost always distinguished from a father by a separate term, whilst this is not the case with an uncle on the father’s side, the former generally living in another community from his nephew, and, besides, very frequently standing to him in a quite peculiar relationship through the rules of succession. It may be fairly assumed, too, that a mother’s sister much oftener than a father’s sister is called a mother, because sisters, among savages, keep as a rule, far more closely together, when married, than brothers and sisters; sometimes even, especially among the North American Indians, they are the wives of the same man. If we add to this that a father’s brother’s son and a mother’s sister’s son are more commonly addressed as brothers than as father’s sister’s son and a mother’s brother’s son, it becomes obvious to how great an extent the nomenclature is influenced by external relations. But as a certain kind of external relationship is invariably connected with a certain degree, or certain degrees, of blood-relationship, the designations given with reference to the former have been taken as terms for the latter. The basis on which Mr. Morgan has built his hypothesis must be considered, then, altogether untenable.[503] It cannot be proved that, where the “classificatory system” prevails, the nomenclature was intended to express the degree of consanguity so exactly as he assumes, or that it had originally anything whatever to do with descent. On the contrary, I have endeavoured to show that the case was probably just the reverse; so that no inference regarding early marriage customs is to be drawn from the terms for relationships. Even now, in Spanish, a brother’s great-grandson is called grandson; in Bulgarian, as also in Russian, a father’s father’s brother is termed a grandfather, and a father’s father’s sister a grandmother; the Greek “ἁνεψιός” appears to have been applied to a nephew, a grandson, and a cousin; “neef,” in Dutch, still expresses these three relationships indiscriminately; in Flemish and Platt Deutsch, “nichte” is applied to a female cousin as well as to a niece; and Shakspeare, in his will, describes his granddaughter, Susannah Hall, as “my niece.”[504] Surely, nobody would look upon these designations as relics of ancient times, when there really might have been some uncertainty as to kinship in the direction which the terms indicate. Mr. Morgan himself admits that, in Latin, “nepos” did not originally signify “either a nephew, grandson or cousin, but that it was used promiscuously to designate a class of persons next without the primary relationships.”[505] * * * * *