Waterbury evening Democrat., 1888-11-24
MARRIAGE AND DESCENT.

Those miserable married men who sit up nights matching schemes to dodge their mother-in-law will find comfort in thee on clusions wrought out by Dr E. B. Tylor and described by him in paper read recently before the British association on the laws of marriage and descent as illus trating his ingenious methods of studying ethnological phenomena.
 Dr Tylor found, on classifying the marriage rules of mankind, that the avoid ance custom between the husband and the wife's family belongs preponderantly to the group of cases where the husband goes to live with his wife's family This happened in fourteen cases, while, if dis tributed by chance, it would have happened in eight cases only. This implies casual connection between the customs of avoid ance and residence, and suggests as a reason that the husband, being an inter loper in the wifes family and being so considered, must be treated as stranger or, as we shall say, Che is not recognized" :" The custom of naming the parent from the child prevails among more than thirty people, and this custom proves on examination, to adhere closely to those of avoidance and residence, the three occurring together among eleven peo- ple, more than six times as often as might be expected to happen by chance occur renee. The connection of these customs finds satisfactory explanation in the ac- counts given by the Cree Indians, where the husband lives in his wife's house, but never speeks to his parents-in-law till his first child is born. This alters the whole situation, for, though the father is not a member of the family, his child is, and when he receives a neW name, meaning father of the newborn child" the whole is brought to logical conclusion by the family recognizing him as soon as he takes this name.
 Dr Tylor has inquired into the divisions of human society-the matriarchal and pa triarchal, or, as he prefers to call them, the maternal and paternal systems: In the former descent ano inheritance follow the mothers side, and the guardian ot the children the maternal uncle, not the father, whose assertion of paternal rights belongs to the paternal system with descent and inheri tance on his side, The problem to bt solved is, which of the two systems is thu more primitive Former inquirers have judged that the maternal system is th' earlier; but pr Tylor is the first to give | firm basis to this theory by showing mum erically that frequently customs of thu maternal stage survive in the paterna! while no instance of the reverse is known Dr Tylor believes that chief underlying cause of both tlsese systems is still tracea ble in society. His tables show tha among 65 people the husband attache himself permanently to the wife's family among 76 such temporary residence is fol lowed by removal to a paterna home, and in 151 cases tn paternal home is tesorted to from the first The changes brought about by the mar ceasing to be in the hands of his wife kinsman and becoming lord of a house hold of his own he considers as the caus of transformation of maternal society.
 Dr Tylor does not carry his interesting inquiries into the results that come iron an insistance by the husband that his con sort shall get up and make the fire in tn morning. Nor does he turn his ethnologi cal horoscope on the domestic discord tha is perennial product of connubial antip lot, f0 cayuinCr roiSSinu hDftOnS Ht might, if he would make a scientific ex cursion into this interesting field, start movement among the bachelors of Americ that would leave nothing in our connubia markets for Chamberlains, Churchills o Sartoris to appropriate.