E. Haida. Commemorative column put in front of the house of deceased, the body being placed at a distance F. Haida. Commemorative column same as last but with two posts ] Brinton says, “The gentile system is by no means universal, ... where it exists, it is often traced in the male line; both property and dignities may be inherited directly from the father.... In fact, no one element of the system was uniformly respected, and it is an error of theorists to make it appear so. It varied widely in the same stock and in all its expressions.”[373] This intricate subject cannot be fully understood till the organisation of many tribes has been studied in detail. “In some tribes, as the Dakota, the gentes had fallen out; in others as among the Ojibways, the Omahas and the Mayas of Yucatan descent had been changed from the female to the male line.”[374] But Powell and Morgan both hold that the majority of the Amerind tribes were organised on the basis of descent in the female line. “The gens came into being,” says Morgan, “upon three principal conceptions, namely: the bond of kin, a pure lineage through descent in the female line, and non-intermarriage in the gens.”[375] Powell in his article on the “North American Indians” in Johnson’s _Cyclopedia_ seems to use the term “clan” to describe a body of kindred with descent in the female line, and “gens” where the descent is in the male line. “In most of the tribes the fundamental unit of organisation was the clan,” he says, and then again, “a few of the tribes were organised on the gentile plan and in the gens kinship is reckoned in the male line.” Such a distinction would be convenient, but Morgan did not recognise it at the time of his writing, as is evident from the quotation above from his _Ancient Society_, and general usage seems not to have defined gens to mean descent in either line specifically. Nevertheless, there is probably no reason why the distinction should not be made with regard to the Amerinds, at least, if it should be agreed upon. Powell also says: “As a clan is a group of people who reckon kinship through females to some ancestral female, real or conventional, so a gens is a group of people who reckon kinship through males to some ancestral male, real or conventional. It seems that the primordial constitution of the tribe is by clanship and that the clanship tribe is developed into the gentile tribe. Most of the tribes of North America have clanship organisation, yet there is a goodly number with gentile organisation, while perhaps it may be said that a majority of the clanship tribes have some elements of the gentile organisation; so that it may be justly affirmed that a great many of the tribes on this continent are in the stage of transition, and there is scarcely a gentile tribe which has not some feature of clanship organisation as a survival.”[376] The privileges and obligations of the gens (or clan) were, according to Morgan as follows: