The evidence for mother-right has never yet been fully brought into notice; but much of the evidence is now available. Our knowledge of the customs of primitive peoples has increased greatly of late years, and these afford a wide field for inquiry. And although the examples of the complete maternal family existing to-day are few in number--probably not more than twenty tribes,[41] yet the important fact is that they occur among widely separated peoples in all the great regions of the uncivilised world. Moreover, side by side with these, are found a much larger number of imperfect systems, which give unmistakable evidence of an earlier maternal stage. Such examples are specially instructive; they belong to a transitional period, and show the maternal family in its decline as it passes into a new patriarchal stage; often, indeed, we see the one system competing in conflict with the other. [41] This is the number given by Prof. Tylor. “The Matriarchal Family System,” _Nineteenth Century_, July 1896. In this connection I may note that Westermarck does not accept an early period when descent was traced exclusively through the mother; he gives a long list of peoples among whom the system is not practised. These passages occur in his well-known _Criticism of the Hypothesis of Promiscuity_,[42] and his whole argument is based on the assumption that mother-right arose through the tie between the father and the child being unrecognised. But mother-descent has no connection at all with uncertainty of paternity. I venture to think Dr. Westermarck has not sufficiently considered this aspect of the question, and, if I mistake not, it is this confusion of mother-descent with promiscuity which explains his attitude towards the maternal system, and his failure to recognise its favourable influence on the status of women. In his opinion this system of tracing descent does not materially affect the relative power of the two sexes.[43] In such a view I cannot help thinking he is mistaken; and I am supported in this by the fact that he makes the important qualification that the husband’s power is impaired when he lives among his wife’s kinsfolk. Now, it is this form of marriage, or the more primitive custom when the husband only visits his wife, that is practised among the peoples who have preserved the complete maternal family. Under such a domestic arrangement, which really reverses the position of the wife and the husband, mother-right is found; this maternal marriage is, indeed, the true foundation of the woman’s power. Where the marriage system has been changed from the maternal to the paternal form, and the wife is taken from the protection of her own kindred to live in the home of her husband, even when descent is still traced through the mother, the chief authority is almost always in the hands of the father. Thus it need not cause surprise to find mother-descent combined with a fully established patriarchal rule. But