In this succession the development
of wife-purchase and the decadence of mother-descent maybe traced, and it
is significant that there is a tendency first toward partial enslavement
of the wife and later toward the multiplication of wives to the limit of
the husband's means, and toward transforming all, or all but one, of the
wives into menials. Thus the lines of development under militant and civil
conditions are essentially parallel. It is possible to project these lines
some distance backward into the unknown, of the exceedingly primitive,
when they, are found to define small discrete bodies--just such as are
indicated by the institutional and linguistic lines--probably family
groups, which must have been essentially, and were perhaps strictly,
monogamous. It would appear that in these groups mating was either between
distant members (under a law of attraction toward the remote and repulsion
from the near, which is shared by mankind and the higher animals), or the
result of accidental meeting between nubile members of different groups;
that in the second case and sometimes in the first the conjugation
produced a new monogamic family; and that sometimes in the first case (and
possibly in the second) the new group retained a more or less definite
connection with the parent group--this connection constituting the germ of
the clan. In passing, it may be noted merely that this inferential origin
of the lines of institutional development is in accord with the habits of
certain higher and incipiently organized animals.
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