remains in Greek and Roman literature, which seemed to point to a period
antecedent to the patriarchal.

In 1876 Mr. J.F. McLennan, a Scotch lawyer, put forth, independently,
practically the same theory, basing it upon certain legal survivals
which he found among many peoples. With Bachofen, he argued that this
matriarchal period must have been characterized by promiscuous relations
of the sexes. In 1877 Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, an American ethnologist and
sociologist, put forth again, independently, practically the same
theory, basing it upon an extensive study of the North American Indian
tribes. Morgan had lived among the Iroquois Indians for years and had
mastered their system of relationship, which previously had puzzled the
whites. He found that they traced relationship through mothers only, and
not at all along the male line. This method of reckoning relationship,
moreover, he found also characterized practically all of the North
American Indian tribes, and he argued that the only explanation of it
was that originally sexual relations were of such an unstable or
promiscuous character that they would not permit of tracing descent
through fathers.

From these theories sociological writers put forth the conclusion that
the primitive state was one of promiscuity, or, as Sir John Lubbock
called it in his _Origin of Civilization_, one of "communism in
women." Post, a German student of comparative jurisprudence, for
example, summed up the theory by saying that "monogamous marriage
originally emerged everywhere from pure communism in women, through the
intermediate stages of limited communism in women, polyandry, and
polygyny." Even Herbert Spencer in his _Principles of Sociology_,
while he avoided accepting such an extreme theory, asserted that in the
beginning sex relations were confused and unregulated, and that all