Polynesia with its Father-right Divides the Mother-
right of Melanesia and Papuasia from the Mother-
right of America, and affiliates with the North
Pacific

(24) But the illustration of the theme would lead us too far. It only remains to point out one indication from sociology that would go far to prove the advance of a Caucasian migration into the world of Polynesia from the north. It is the strange phenomenon, noticed by Ratzel in his "History of Mankind," that between the mother-right of social organisation all through Australia, Melanesia, and Papuasia, and to some extent Indonesia on the west, and all through America on the east, there is thrust the wedge of Micronesia and Polynesia with a totally different social system, that of father-right. The one makes the children follow the mother, and possess property through the mother, an essentially primitive stage of the family, developing perhaps out of promiscuity after the idea of property and rights had evolved. The couvade, or lying-in of the father instead of the mother on the birth of a child, is an effort towards the evolution of the father-right from the page 38mother-right. For the patriarchate or headship of the father in the family, so familiar to the European mind as to seem almost the only natural or existing social system, is a late development amongst all races but the Caucasian and the nomad tribes of the Mongols. It means the law of chastity in married life, so that the true heir may be known, and hence the hedging round of the family as the true social unit, and of the hearth as the sacred centre of life; and, when amalgamation into tribes occurs, the chiefship passes from father to oldest son. It implies the rgime of primogeniture.

(25) Now Polynesia as the realm of the patriarchate, or father-headship, divides the matriarchate of America from that of Melanesia and Papuasia. And through Micronesia it affiliates to the patriarchate of the Aino social system. Between it and India, another realm of the patriarchate, there intervenes an unbroken realm of matriarchate. In bringing our Polynesians wholly from South Asia and its social organisation, we have to make a leap. In bringing them from the Japanese Archipelago, we have no break in the continuity of the father-right.