Finally, Mr. McLennan plants himself upon two alleged mistakes which vitiate, in his opinion, my explanation of the origin of the classificatory system. “In attempting to explain the origin of the classificatory system, Mr. Morgan made two radical mistakes. His first mistake was, that he did not steadily contemplate the main peculiarity of the system—its classification of the connected persons; that he did not seek the origin of the system in the origin of the classification” (p. 360). What is the difference in this case, between the system and the classification? The two mean the same thing, and cannot by any possibility be made to mean anything different. To seek the origin of one is to seek the origin of the other.
“The second mistake, or rather I should say error, was to have so lightly assumed the system to be a system of blood ties” (p. 361). There is no error here, since the persons named in the Tables are descended from common ancestors, or connected by marriage with some one or more of them. They are the same persons who are described in the Table showing the Aryan, Semitic, and Uralian systems (Consanguinity, pp. 79-127). In each and all of these systems they are bound to each other in fact by consanguinity and affinity. In the latter each relationship is specialized; in the former they are classified in categories; but in all alike the ultimate basis is the same, namely, actual consanguinity and affinity. Marriage in the group in the former, and marriage between single pairs in the latter, produced the difference between them. In the Malayan, Turanian and Ganowánian systems, there is a solid basis for the blood-relationships they exhibit in the common descent of the persons; and for the marriage-relationships we must look to the form of marriage they indicate. Examination and comparison show that two distinct forms of marriage are requisite to explain the Malayan and Turanian systems; whence the application, as tests of consanguine marriage in one case, and a punaluan marriage in the other.
While the terms of relationship are constantly used in salutation, it is because they are terms of relationship that they are so used. Mr. McLennan’s attempt to turn them into conventional modes of addressing persons is futile. Although he lays great stress upon this view he makes no use of them as “modes of address” in attempting to explain their origin. So far as he makes any use of them he employs them strictly as terms of consanguinity and affinity. It was as impossible that “a system of modes of addressing persons” should have grown up independently of the system of consanguinity and affinity (p. 373), as that language should have grown up independently of the ideas it represents and expresses. What could have given to these terms their significance as used in addressing relatives, but the relationship whether of consanguinity or affinity which they expressed? The mere want of a mode of addressing persons could never have given such stupendous systems, identical in minute details over immense sections of the earth.
Upon the essential difference between Mr. McLennan’s explanation of the origin of the classificatory system, and the one presented in this volume—whether it is a system of modes of addressing persons, or a system of consanguinity and affinity—I am quite content to submit the question to the judgment of the reader.