some aunt or grandmother, he must retreat to his own clan, or, as was often done, go and start a new matrimonial alliance in some other.  The women were the great power among the clans as everywhere else.  They did not hesitate, when occasion required, to “knock off the horns,” so it was technically called, from the head of a chief and send him back to the ranks of the warriors.  The original nomination of the chiefs, also, always rested with them.[98]

Traces of the maternal system are everywhere found on the American continent, and in some regions it is still in force.  McGee says of the Seri stock of the southwest coast, now reduced to a single tribe, that the claims of a suitor are pressed by his female relatives, and, if the suit is favorably regarded by the mother and uncles of the girl, the suitor is provisionally installed in the house, without purchase price and presents.  He is then expected to show his worthiness of a permanent relation by demonstrating his ability as a provider, and by showing himself an implacable foe to aliens.  He must support all the female relatives of his bride’s family by the products of his skill and industry in hunting and fishing for a year.  He is the general protector of the girl’s family, and especially of the girl, whose bower and pelican-skin couch he shares, “not as husband, but as continent companion,” for a year.  If all goes well, he is then permanently received as “consort-guest,” and his children are added to the clan of his mother-in-law.[99] With few exceptions, descent was formerly reckoned in Australia in the female line, and the usage survives in some regions.  Howitt, in a letter to Professor Tylor, reports of the tribes near Maryborough, Queensland: 

When a man marries a woman from a distant locality, he goes to her tribelet and identifies himself with her people.  This is a rule with very few exceptions.  Of course, I speak of them as they were in their wild state.  He becomes a part of, and one of, the family.  In the event of a war expedition, the daughter’s husband acts as a blood-relation, and will fight and kill his own blood-relations, if blows are struck by his wife’s relations.  I have seen a father and son fighting under these circumstances, and the son would most certainly have killed the father, if others had not interfered.[100]

In Australia there is also a very sharp social expression of the fact of sex in the division of the group into male and female classes in addition to the division into clans.[101] In the Malay Archipelago the same system is found.

Among the Padang Malays the child always belongs to its mother’s suku, and all blood-relationship is reckoned through the wife as the real transmitter of the family, the husband being only a stranger.  For this reason his heirs are not his own children, but the children of his sister, his brothers, and other uterine relations; children are the natural heirs of their mother