A further concomitant variation in the cultural scheme, associated with and presumably traceable to the same technological ground, is maternal descent, the counting of relationship primarily or solely in the female line. In the present state of the evidence on this head it would probably be too broad a proposition to say that the counting of relationship by the mother’s side is due wholly to preconceptions arising out of the technology of fertility and growth and that it so is remotely a creature of the instinct of workmanship; but it is at least equally probable that that ancient conceit must be abandoned according to which the system of maternal descent arises out of an habitual doubt of paternity. The mere obvious congruity of the cognatic system as contrasted with the agnatic, has presumably had as much to do with the matter as anything, and under the rule of the primitive technology of tillage and cattle-breeding this obvious congruity of the cognate relationship will have been very materially re-enforced by the current preconceptions regarding the preferential importance of the female line for the welfare of the household and the community. And so long as that technological era lasted, and until the more strenuous culture of predation and coercion came on and threw the male element in the community into the place of first consequence, maternal descent as well as the mother goddess appear to have held their own. * * * * * It will have been noticed that through all this argument runs the presumption that the culture which included the beginnings and early growth of tillage and cattle-breeding was substantially a peaceable culture. This presumption is somewhat at variance with the traditional view, particularly with the position taken as a matter of course by earlier students of ethnology in the nineteenth century. Still it is probably not subject to very serious question today. As the evidence has accumulated it has grown increasingly manifest that the ancient assumption of a primitive state of nature after the school of Hobbes cannot be accepted. The evidence from contemporary sources, as to the state of things in this respect among savages and many of the lower barbarians, points rather to peace than to war as the habitual situation, although this evidence is by no means unequivocal; besides which, the evidence from these contemporary lower cultures bears only equivocally on the point of first interest here,--viz., the antecedents of the Western civilisation. What is more to the point, though harder to get at in any definitive way, is the prehistory of this civilisation. Here the inquiry will perforce go on survivals and reminiscences and on the implications of known facts of antiquity as well as of certain features still extant in the current cultural scheme.