deain:
"The Family is the type of an archaic society in all the modifications which it was capable of assuming;
but the Family here spoken of is not exactly the family as understood by a modern. In order to reach the ancient conception, we must give our modern ideas an important extension, and an important limitation. We must look on the Family as constantly enlarged by the absorption of strangers within its circle, and we must try to regard the fiction of adoption as so closely simulating the reality of Kinship that neither law nor opinion makes the slightest difference between a real and an adoptive connexion. On the other hand, the persons theoretically amalgamated into a family by the descent, are practically held together by common obedience to their highest living ascendant, the father, grand-father, or great-grandfather.
"The patriarchal authority of the Chieftain is as necessary an ingredient in the notion of the family group, as the fact, (or assumed fact), of its having
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