Excerpt from Primitive Society: The Beginnings of the Family and the Reckoning of Descent Thenceforward for some years the priority of maternal kinship to paternal was generally, though perhaps not universally, accepted. But mclennan's further contentions - that female infanticide, induced by the necessities of savage life, led to the capture of women from other tribes, and this to the general practice of exogamy, that exogamy was the cause of matrilineal kinship, and that marriage thus beginning with the capture and appropriation of women, resulted in paternity becoming certain and so led to patrilineal kinship - Challenged by Lubbock, Morgan and other writers, have always remained controversial. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.