BOOK REVIEWS 379
for the building of houses nor explain why, although all houses possess foundations, they possess such varied form, structure, and size.
Similarly as regards the clan:
There is no fixed succession of maternal and paternal descent; sibless tribes may pass directly into the matrilineal or the patrilineal condition; if the highest civilizations emphasize the paternal side of the family, so do many of the lowest ; and the social history of a particular people cannot be reconstructed from any generally valid scheme of evolution but only in the light of its known and probable cultural relations with neighboring peoples.
Or again as regards the status of women:
That neither this superstitious sentiment nor man's physical superiority has produced a far greater debarment of primitive woman, that she is generally well treated and able to influence masculine decision regardless of all theory as to her inferiority or impurity, that it is precisely among some of the rudest peoples that she enjoys practical equality with her mate, these are the general conclu- sions which an unbiased survey of the data seems to establish.
On societies:
It follows that the search for all-embracing laws of evolution on the model of Morgan's or Schurtz's schemes is a wild-goose chase and that only an intensive ethnographic study in each cultural province can establish the actual sequence of stages.
As regards law and government:
The majority of primitive communities recognize not merely wrongs inflicted by individuals upon individuals and precipitating a dispute between their respec- tive kins, but over and above the law of torts there is generally a law of crimes, of outrages resented not by a restricted group of relatives but by the entire com- munity or its directors. The conclusion . . . shows the reality of the territorial unit for certain specific social aims. . . . The territorial bond must then be considered as one of the social ties occurring concomitantly with others in the simpler stages of civilization.
These, accordingly, are some of the formulations of sane ethnological research, of the historical method applied to undated data; formulations agreeing with those which other workers have reached in special studies, and which every modern ethnologist of the historical school will readily subscribe to.
It goes almost without saying, then, that Lowie's book is indispens- able to whose who desire a fair summary of the facts of primitive society, presented in digest and proportion, with convincing evidence and" admirable lucidity. This is a book which those who entertain schemes, of social progress will come to hungrily if they recognize the value of possessing a knowledge of the past for construction of the future. It is
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