bride.1 By this act of the chief, or of the priest, the marriage at once received a special consecration, and a numerous and distinguished family was promised to the married pair. On the Malabar coast, for instance, the bridegroom pays for such an act of coition.2 The custom is founded on the same ideas which induce the Eskimos to surrender their wives to the Angekok, and, in connection with ideas of the value of friendship, it is easy to explain the custom by which the bridegroom surrendered his bride to the wedding guests before he himself had intercourse with her.3 These facts throw a strong light upon the bond between the father and child, and we must go back a long way in order to understand this bond. Father and child are united together by certain privileges, and the latter is usually, but not necessarily, begotten by the former. In addition to this legal relation and to the stream of ideas deduced from it, there was а sense of the influence of the actual father on the child's character, and as time went on these two groups of ideas, which were originally quite distinct, necessarily became intermingled. We can adduce some curious particulars on this subject. The Liburni had their wives in common, and the children were all brought up together until they were five years old. They were then collected and examined in order to trace their likeness to the men, and they were assigned to their fathers accordingly. Whoever received a boy from his mother in this way, regarded him as his son. It was customary among the Arabs for several men, sometimes as many as ten, to own one Spix and Martius, vol. ii. p. 574; vol. iii. Herrera, p. 336. Garcilasso, p. 31. Waitz, vol. v. p. 111. 1 Azara, vol. ii. p. 141. pp. 1189, 1211. Schmidt, pp. 216, 309, 366. 2 Ibid., pp. 313, 358. Baleares, Bachofen, Mutterrecht, p. 12. Nasamones, Herodotus, book iv. chap. 172. Schmidt, p. 38. Bachofen, Mutterrecht, p. 20. wife; she afterwards decided to which of them the child should belong, or else the woman was constrained to pitch her tent by the road side, where every one, except the men in question, might have access to her. The child was then assigned by an expert to one of the joint husbands, to be regarded as his own, which, in fact, it was not. When a Hindu marries, all the children previously born from his wife become his own; and in Pakpatan, even when a woman has forsaken her husband for ten years, the children which she brings forth are divided between him and her lover.2 Among the Marianas, when a divorced wife or an unmarried woman with children marries, the husband is regarded as their true father.3 It is not due to promiscuous intercourse and the female line that blood-relationship is not the ground for the legal connection between father and son. If the female line that is, a legal connection dependent on the mother had at any time its origin in the exclusive recognition of the maternal tie of blood, this would involve the thesis that the juridical relation was in accordance with the facts of procreation. But in that case the growing power of fatherhood would have displayed the same tendency, and would not have obtained the superiority merely as a juridical order of things, quite independent of considerations of blood. 1 Wilken, p. 26. 2 Wade, Journal of Asiat. Soc. of Bengal, vol. vi., 1837, p. 196. 8 Freycinet, vol. ii. p. i. pt. 476. CHAPTER II. POLYANDRY. McLennan's theory--Child murder and polvandry-Scarcity of women and polyandry-Stages of polyandry-Transition to male line-Child murder without significance--Promiscuous intercourse and polyandry -Polyandry of Nairs-Polyandry of Thibetans-Eldest brotherLimitations of marriage-Causes of polyandry-Forms of polyandry -Family communism. EXACTLY the same features are presented to us by the external form of marriage; and the inquiries which we are about to make will complete the materials furnished in the former chapter, and will carry us a good step further. McLennan believes that nothing has had so much influence on the development of the family as polyandry, which he holds to have been the first stage of progress, and necessary as a transition from promiscuous intercourse to monogamous marriage. Polyandry alone made such progress possible, and can itself become intelligible merely when we regard it as a stage of transition. McLennan's researches and theory have been received with a consideration which is in many respects well deserved, for although his estimate of polyandry has not been altogether accepted, and is scarcely entitled to be so accepted, since the theory is too loosely constructed, yet all that he has adduced displays such sound judgment and perspicacity that hardly any other writer on the subject is equally instructive. Even if the conclusive value of his suggestions is negative, a careful and critical examination of them will repay us. It McLennan affirms that men originally lived in hordes, in which there was much internal strife, in consequence of which they were broken up into smaller hordes. is certain that these conflicts usually occurred about women, and probably between groups of the horde, and not between individuals; the individual was compelled to practise promiscuous intercourse, since he was unable to take a wife for himself alone, to isolate himself, and to found a family.1 McLennan goes on to say that child-murder was extensively practised by the hordes, the female infants being usually put to death, since women were held to be a source of weakness to the clan. This custom made women scarce, and led both to polyandry and to the introduction of alien women within the clan.2 The later custom led to exogamy and to the symbol of rape which is part of the wedding ceremonies of many peoples, and polyandry subsisted independently as the germ of the regular marriage forms of later times. It was the first faint limitation of promiscuous intercourse, and was called into being as soon as a scarcity of women made it necessary to group the sexes. The first mode of grouping is found by McLennan among the Nairs, as it has been described above; one woman lived with several men, strangers to each other, and these had access to more than one woman.3 McLennan adds that it was a step in advance when the woman, while still living among her own people, no longer dwelt under her mother's roof, but had a hut of her own, in which she received her lovers. The woman's migration to her husband's house followed, that is, she was taken away from her mother's dwelling in order to become a wife Appendix XXXI. McLennan, Studies, pp. 131, 134. 3 ✦ Ibid., p. 152. common to a circle of brothers. In the two earlier stages, the female line of descent is necessary, since the father cannot be ascertained; but in the latter stage, the paternal line may begin to appear, since in this case the husbands are brothers, so that the paternal blood, although not yet the individual father, may be ascertained. McLennan, however, only regards considerations of paternity as a secondary cause; he holds it to be a much more important fact that now that the woman inhabits another house the course of succession in the female line which has hitherto been followed will no longer keep the property in the family, but must lead to a general dispersion of the family possessions.1 Even in the earlier stages it was possible for the man who had special reasons for regarding himself as the father of a given child to assign the inheritance to his son, to the exclusion of the sister's son, since he was at liberty to give as much as he pleased to the son before his death. If such an attempt had played any important part in history, we must admit that the question of the paternity would be decisive, and considerations as to the property would only be the consequence, not the cause. In his latest treatise, McLennan holds that in addition to considerations as to the property, the consecration of the dead was also a means of introducing the paternal line of descent, so soon as there was a physical certainty of fatherhood. By this consecration the child, or the mother and her child together, were admitted into the father's clan. It appears that, while McLennan holds that the final impulse towards the introduction of the paternal line was given by pecuniary interests, the wish for such legal order was prompted by ideas of paternity. He believes that men had originally no idea of kinship, 1 McLennan, p. 154. As we have already said, such conditions are still to be found. Buchanan, vol. ii. p. 513; vol. iii. p. 16. 2 McLennan, Patr. Th., ch. xiii. |