Locus parentis

“ In the classificatory system most of the kin in the same generation are grouped under one general term; e.g., all the males of the grandfather’s generation are called by one term—another term includes father, father’s brothers, father’s male cousins, mother’s sisters’ husbands, mother’s female cousins’ husbands, and so on. ”

“ The children are only considered as the offspring of the mother, and have no right or title to inherit the kingdom, or any thing else belonging to the father; and when grown up, are only held in that rank or estimation which belongs to the blood or parentage of their mother. Brothers succeed to brothers ”

“ If any one’s father be killed, the sons are to take collectively one half of the composition, and the other half is to be divided between the parentes who are proximiores, both of the paternal and maternal kindreds. ”

“ Recognizing this intuitive tendency of boys to organize and maintain gangs, in whatever multifarious forms it may take, and the pernicious influence of unguided and unrestrained organizations on his moral and physical life, it is incumbent on parents and those standing in loco parentis to supply him with an organization which will satisfy the gang spirit in his nature. ”

“ When the wife becomes pregnant, the eldest brother performs the ceremony of giving the bow and arrow, but the brothers are all equally regarded as the fathers of the child. If one of the brothers leaves the rest and sets up an establishment of his own, it appeared, however, that he might lose his right to be regarded as the father of the children.
If a man is asked the name of his father, he usually gives the name of one man only, even when he is the offspring of a polyandrous marriage. ”

“ Thus, of the children of a tall, thin, dark man, and a short, fat, fair woman, some will be like their father, and the others will resemble their mother, or, perhaps, all may "take after" either parent. Sometimes a child appears to be in every respect unlike its parents, and occasionally the likeness of an ancestor appears in a descendant, in whom no resemblance to his immediate progenitors can be detected. ”

“ Assuming the account we have of the beliefs of the Arunta to be correct as far as it goes, the tracing of descent in the male line for the purpose of determining the exogamous group to which a child shall belong involves, and can involve, no real recognition of blood. Yet the tables of kinship show that some relation is held to subsist between father and child. ”

“ But the essential point is that here the mother’s brother’s son and all his male descendants through males are indiscriminately classed with the maternal uncle. It is clear that they are all members of the same gens, and corresponding to our Hidatsa experiment we find that as soon as we pass outside the gens the terminology changes: my mother’s brother’s daughter’s son is not my maternal uncle but my brother since his mother, the uncle’s daughter, is called ‘mother’, belonging as she must to my mother’s gens. ”

“ Offspring Derived from One Parent Only.—So far in our reckoning of heredity we have counted elements from both father and mother, and the complications which arise from such a double ancestry are manifestly very perplexing ones. If we could do away with the elements of sex and find offspring that are derived from one parent only, it would seemingly simplify our problem very much for we should thus have a direct line of descent, free from intermingling. ”

“ This conclusion follows from the fact that children of the same parents are never exactly identical. In one child the characters of the father may predominate, in another those of the mother, in another again those of either grand-parent or great-grand-parent. ”

“ A daughter becoming on marriage a part of her husband’s family ceases to be a member of her own, and her descendants are no benefit to it, unless, perchance, having no brothers, one of her sons is adopted by her father. ”

“ The only definite restrictions on the utterance of the names of living people are those connected with kinship which have already been considered in Chapter XXI. A man may not utter the names of his mother’s brother, his grandfather and grandmother, his wife’s mother, and of the man from whom he has received his wife, who is usually the wife’s father. ”

“ Fatherhood may pass through many stages, from a light flitting from one polyandric household to another, on to that form in which the several husbands of the female head of such households must be distinctly related to each other, but, through all the varieties of polyandry, the fixed stake of classification and localization of offspring defines the family outline. ”

“ The widespread custom of naming a father after his child has sometimes been supposed to spring from a desire on the father's part to assert his paternity, apparently as a means of obtaining those rights over his children which had previously, under a system of mother-kin, been possessed by the mother. ”

“ Failing father or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of growth in a larger organism, the gens, which consisted of all those who shared a common ancestry. ”

“ The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the father, and the possessions of the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than in a proprietary character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence. ”

“ But, some one may protest, are we not shattering the very edifice of which we are professed defenders, in thus denying the force of heredity? Not at all. We wish merely to emphasize that a man has sixteen great-great-grandparents, instead of one, and that those in the maternal lines are too often overlooked, although from a biological point of view they are every bit as important as those in the paternal lines. And we wish further to emphasize the point that it is the near relatives who, on the whole, represent what one is. ”

“ If there be no children, nor their descendants, father, mother, brothers or sisters, nor their descendants, then to the grandfather, grandmother, uncles and aunts and their descendants, in equal parts, and so on in other cases, without end, passing to the nearest lineal ancestor, and their children and their descendants, in equal parts. ”

“ Descent here is clearly maternal, but the form of paternal descent is preserved, a plausible condition for a people who; having become maternal, still stick at least in form to the traditional inheritance from the father. ”

“ The male member of the family inherits, but he does so only as the son of a female member of the family through whom he may justly claim kinship, or, to put it in another form, a man's natural heir is not his son, or his brother's son, or the descendant of a common male ancestor, but his sister's, or his sister's daughter's son, or the descendant of a common female ancestress. ”

“ So many factors are at work and there are possible so many combinations of factors that no one can tell; for it is during the period of adolescence that hereditary characteristics show themselves. Up to this time the child is a child of the race; during this period it becomes the offspring of its parents. And the factors of heredity—father, mother, ancestry—are mingling and clashing and combining with the factors of environment, and what the outcome is going to be, nobody knows, in specific cases, in advance. ”

“ For instance, we understand now why a son does not inherit anything, not so much as a tobacco-pipe, at his father's death. He is counted as the mother's child. For the same reason, if the {20} mother has had more than one husband, and children by each marriage, these are all counted as full brothers and sisters, because they have the same mother. ”

“ Indeed, it is sometimes to be remarked in this kind of variation, that the variety belongs, strictly speaking, to neither of the immediate parents; you will see a child in a family who is not like either its father or its mother ”

“ The clause pictures for us the family group as bound together by paternal rites (sacris paternis) . The grandfather is alive and is the paterfamilias. A son who is a filiusfamilias (i.e., as we shall see presently, not an emancipated son) has married and brought into the mansio, or family homestead of the grandfather, property which he had with his wife. [282] This, not having been ‘defined’ on marriage, so as to keep it separate, has become, in the phrase of the Latin text, ‘added to the property of the grandfather.’ The husband has died leaving several sons, it matters not how many. ”

“ Possibly we have here an explanation of some hereditary phenomena in human beings. If there is an unequal division, and more of the male than of the female nucleus, the child might, as a result, inherit more of the father's than of the mother's characteristics, or the reverse. ”

“ We know that many traits, good and bad, are transmitted by heredity. And naturally when traits are possessed by both father and mother they stand a much greater chance of being transmitted to the offspring than if possessed by one of the parents alone. Now then, if a certain bad trait, such as epilepsy or insanity, is present in a family that trait is present in both cousins, and the likelihood of children from such a marriage inheriting that trait is much greater than when the parents are strangers, the taint being present in the family of only one of the parents. ”

“ That distinguished men do not more frequently have distinguished sons, may readily be accounted for when it is recollected that the inherited character is due to the combined influence of both parents. The desirable qualities of the father may therefore be neutralized in the offspring by the opposite or defective qualities of the mother. ”

“ Just as the teeth and the beard are not usually innate in man, but come and grow like those of the parents and are already implanted, piece for piece, in the new-born child, and are thus hereditary, so the first ideas of the infant, his first concepts, which arise unconsciously, without volition and without the possibility of inhibition, in every individual in the same way, must be called hereditary. ”

“ The habits of the “much-married” primitive men made mistake about any one’s mother less likely than mistake about his father; and, if in civilised times it is, as the saying goes, a wise child that knows its own father, he was, in barbarous times, a wise father who knew his own child. Examples tracing the kinship through females, father and offspring being never of the same clan, abound in both ancient and modern authorities, and perhaps the most amusing one that can be given is found in Dr. ”

“ The children of such parents could not be supposed to be altogether different from themselves, for though there are anomalies in nature, it rarely happens that the offspring are not like either father or mother, still less that they are not ultimately influenced by the example of parents. ”

“ As another illustration, we will select a not exceptional instance of a low type of parents, whose ancestors may or may not have been below their own level, but certainly not above it. To these parents are born a number of children who may more or less closely resemble them, but among the brood is one so entirely unlike any of the others as to perhaps arouse suspicion as to his or her paternity. ”

“ But a paternalism must have a parent, a royal sire, or a priestly grandmother. In the antique paternalisms there is invariably this parental personality at the top; down beneath it are the puppet children. ”

“ Thus the inference in regard to the sequence of maternal and paternal institutions, to which I referred before, is based on the generalization that because in a few cases paternal families have developed from maternal ones, therefore all paternal families have developed in the same way. If we do not make the assumption that the same phenomena have everywhere developed in the same way, then we may just as well conclude that paternal families have in some cases arisen from maternal institutions, in other cases in other ways. ”

“ A frequent source of doubt and misunderstanding is the universal occurrence of such distinct types among brothers and sisters. The query at once arises, "Have not these children the same heredity?" Brothers and sisters have the same ancestors, but not the same heredity. Recent biological discoveries teach us that the individual develops from a bundle of units derived from the two parents, but the units supplied by a parent never represent the totality of the parents' composition, nor do all the units that are passed on come to manifest themselves as parts of the character. ”

“ A person who had no children or direct lineal descendants might bequeath his property at pleasure: if he died without a will, first his father, then his brother or brother's children, next his sister or sister's children succeeded: if none such existed, then the cousins by the father's side, next the cousins by the mother's side,—the male line of descent having preference over the female. ”

“ No one can doubt the law of hereditary transmission. Our inherited and acquired characteristics are sure to be transmitted to our descendants. Indeed, so thoroughly does character permeate one's entire being that it might be said of each drop of blood that in its characteristics it is a miniature of the person in whose body it was secreted. Eminent characters do not emanate from degenerate parents; and neither is the reverse true, except as the result of adequate reversionary influences. ”