Of Families.
IT is almost every where a custom for the wife to pass into the family of the husband. The contrary is without any inconveniency established at Formosa, where the husband enters into the family of the wife.
This law, which fixes the family in a succession of persons of the same sex, greatly contributes, independently of the first motives, to the propagation of the human species. The family is a kind of property: a man who has children of a sex which does not perpetuate it, is never satisfied if he has not those who can render it perpetual.
Names, whereby men acquire an idea of a thing, which one would imagine ought not to perish, are extremely proper to inspire every family with a desire of extending its duration. There are people, amongst whom names distinguish families: there are others, where they only distinguish persons: the latter have not the same advantage as the former.