follow that it represents the earliest stage in the evolution of human society. There are certain features even of the classificatory system itself which suggest that, if this system be founded in sexual communism, this communism was not primitive, but grew out of a condition in which only such ties of kinship were recognised as would result from the social institution of the family.
I must be content with this brief reference to the subject. The object of these lectures is to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social conditions, and the dependence of the classificatory system upon a condition of sexual communism is not now capable of demonstration. The classificatory mode of denoting relationship should, however, act as a suggestion and stimulus, and as a preventative of dogmatic statement in a part of our subject which, in spite of its entrancing interest, still lies only at the edge of our slowly spreading circle of exact knowledge.
In conclusion, I should like to point out briefly some of the lessons of more general interest which may be learnt from the facts I have brought before you in these lectures. I hope that one result has been to convince you of the danger lying in the use of the reductio ad absurdum argument when dealing with cultures widely different from our own. In the literature of the subject one often meets the adjectives "absurd" and "impossible" applied in some cases to social conditions in which the actual existence of the absurdities or impossi-
