It has already been seen that under the rule of female descent, as shown by Mr.Hartland in _Primitive Paternity_, the chastity of women was as a rule scarcely regarded at all or even conceived of.

After the change to the patriarchal system a similar laxity seems to have prevailed for some period, and it was thought that any child born to a man in his house or on his bed was his own, even though he might not be the father.

This idea obtained among the Arabs, as pointed out by Professor Robertson Smith in _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_, and is also found in the Hindu classics, and to some extent even in modern practice.

It was perhaps based on the virtue assigned to concrete facts; just as the Hindus think that a girl is properly married by going through the ceremony with an arrow or a flower, and that the fact of two children being suckled by the same woman, though she is not their mother, establishes a tie akin to consanguinity between them, so they might have thought that the fact of a boy being born in a man's house constituted him the man's son.

Subsequently, however, the view came to be held that the clan blood was communicated directly through the father, to whom the life of the child was solely assigned in the early patriarchal period.