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Of this larger body of kindred, existing, as I could see, in very distinct form among the Seminole, I gained but little definite knowledge. What few facts I secured are here placed on record.

After I was enabled to make my inquiry understood, I sought to learn from my respondent the name of the gens to which each Indian whose name I had received belonged. As the result, I found that the two hundred and eight Seminole now in Florida are divided into the following gentes and in the following numbers:

1.	Wind gens	21
2.	Tiger gens	58
3.	Otter gens	39
4.	Bird gens	41
5.	Deer gens	18
6.	Snake gens	15
7.	Bear gens	4
8.	Wolf gens	1
9.	Alligator gens	1
	Unknown gentes	10
	Total	208

I endeavored, also, to learn the name the Indians use for gens or clan, and was told that it is “Po-ha-po-hûm-ko-sin;” the best translation I can give of the name is “Those of one camp or house.”

Examining my table to find whether or not the word as translated describes the fact, I notice that, with but one exception, which may not, after all, prove to be an exception, each of the twenty-two camps into which the thirty-seven Seminole families are divided is a camp in which all the persons but the husbands are members of one gens. The camp at Miami is an apparent exception. There Little Tiger, a rather important personage, lives with a number of unmarried relatives. A Wolf has married one of Little Tiger’s sisters and lives in the camp, as properly he should. Lately Tiger himself has married an Otter, but, instead of leaving his relatives and going to the camp of his wife’s kindred, his wife has taken up her home with his people.

At the Big Cypress Swamp I tried to discover the comparative rank or dignity of the various clans. In reply, I was told by one of the Wind clan that they are graded in the following order. At the northernmost camp, however, another order appears to have been established.

Big Cypress camp.	Northernmost camp.
1.	The Wind.	1.	The Tiger.
2.	The Tiger.	2.	The Wind.
3.	The Otter.	3.	The Otter.
4.	The Bird.	4.	The Bird.
5.	The Deer.	5.	The Bear.
6.	The Snake.	6.	The Deer.
7.	The Bear.	7.	The Buffalo.
8.	The Wolf.	8.	The Snake.
		9.	The Alligator.
		10.	The Horned Owl.

This second order was given to me by one of the Bird gens and by one who calls himself distinctively a “Tallahassee” Indian. The Buffalo and the Horned Owl clans seem now to be extinct in Florida, and I am not altogether sure that the Alligator clan also has not disappeared.

The gens is “a group of relatives tracing a common lineage to some remote ancestor. This lineage is traced by some tribes through the mother and by others through the father.” “The gens is the grand unit of social organization, and for many purposes is the basis of governmental organization.” To the gens belong also certain rights and duties.

Of the characteristics of the gentes of the Florida Seminole, I know only that a man may not marry a woman of his own clan, that the children belong exclusively to the mother, and that by birth they are members of her own gens. So far as duogamy prevails now among the Florida Indians, I observed that both the wives, in every case, were members of one gens. I understand also that there are certain games in which men selected from gentes as such are the contesting participants.