resulted in the condition where several men had one woman—polyandry. The next consequence was that the mother of a child could be ascertained, but not its father; hence: descent only traced by the female line and exclusion of male lineage—maternal law. And a second consequence of the scarcity of women in a certain tribe—a scarcity that was somewhat mitigated, but not relieved by polyandry—was precisely the forcible abduction of women from other tribes. "As exogamy and polyandry are referable to one and the same cause—a want of balance between the sexes—we are forced to regard all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous.... Therefore we must hold it to be beyond dispute that among exogamous races the first system of kinship was that which recognized blood-ties through mothers only."2
It is the merit of McLennan to have pointed out the general extent and the great importance of what he calls exogamy. However, he has by no means discovered the fact of exogamous groups; neither did he understand their presence. Aside from earlier scattered notes of many observers—from which McLennan quoted—Latham had accurately and correctly described this institution among the Indian Magars3 and stated that it was widespread and practiced in all parts of the globe. McLennan himself quotes this passage. As early as 1847, our friend Morgan had also pointed out and correctly described the same custom in his letters on the Iroquois (in the American Review) and in 1851 in "The League of the Iroquois." We shall see, how the lawyer's instinct of McLennan has introduced more disorder into this subject than the mystic imagination of Bachofen did into the field of maternal law.
It must be said to McLennan's credit that he recognized the custom of tracing decent by maternal law as primeval, although Bachofen has anticipated him in this respect. McLennan has admitted this later on. But here again he is not clear on the subject. He always speaks of "kinship through females only" and uses this expression, correctly applicable to former stages, in connection with later stages of development, when