On grounds of magical-technological expediency, then, as well as by force of the sense of intrinsic propriety, women come to take the leading rôle in the industrial community of the early time, and the community’s material interests come to centre about them and their relation to the natural products of the fields; and since this interest bears immediately on the fecundity of the flocks and crops, it is particularly in their character of motherhood that the women come most vitally into the case. The natural produce on which the life of the group depends, therefore, will appertain to the women, in some intimate sense of congruity, so that in the fitness of things this produce will properly come to the good of the community through their hands and will logically be dispensed somewhat at their discretion. So great is the reach of this logic of congruity that in the known cultures which show much reminiscence of this early technological phase it is commonly possible to detect some remnant of such discretionary control of the natural produce by the women. And modern students, imbued with modern preconceptions of ownership and predaceous mastery, have even found themselves constrained by this evidence to discover a system of matriarchy and maternal ownership in these usages that antedate the institution of ownership. Conceivably, the usages growing out of this preferential position of women in the technology and ritual of early husbandry will, now and again, by the uniform drift of habituation have attained such a degree of consistency, been wrought into so rigid a form of institutions, as to have been carried over into a later phase of culture in which the ownership of goods is of the essence of the scheme; and in such case these usages may then have come to be reconstrued in terms of ownership, to the effect that the ownership of agricultural products vests of right in the woman, the mother of the household.