gives to the mother and her offspring, and the seeming affection which
exists between all members of the group. Such a group of parents and
offspring among the higher apes is, moreover, a relatively permanent
affair, children of different ages being frequently found along with
their parents in such groups. So far as the evidence of animals next to
man, therefore, goes, there is no reason for supposing that the human
family life sprang from confused or promiscuous sex relations in which
no permanent union between male and female parent existed. On the
contrary, there is every reason to believe, as Westermarck says, that
human family life is an inheritance from man's apelike progenitor.

The Evidence from the Lower Human Races.--The evidence afforded by the
lowest peoples in point of culture even more clearly, if anything,
refutes the hypothesis of a primitive state of promiscuity. The habits
or customs of the lowest peoples were not well known previous to the
nineteenth century. Therefore it was possible for such a theory as the
patriarchal theory of the primitive family to remain generally accepted,
as we have already said, down to the middle of the nineteenth century.
This was the theory that the oldest or most primitive type of human
family life is that depicted in the opening pages of the Book of
Genesis, namely, a family life in which the father or eldest male of the
family group is the absolute ruler of the group and practically owner of
all persons and property. The belief that this was the primitive type of
the human family life was first attacked by a German-Swiss philologist
by the name of Bachofen in a work entitled _Das Mutterrecht_ (The
Matriarchate), published in 1861, in which he argued that antecedent to
the patriarchal period was a matriarchal period, in which women were
dominant socially and politically, and in which relationships were
traced through mothers only. Bachofen got his evidence for this theory
from certain ancient legends, such as that of the Amazons, and other