Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/874

 REVIEWS.

Social Origins; by ANDREW LANG. Primal Law; by J. J. ATKIN- SON. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903. Pp.

MR. LANG performs an office of great value to science by the volumes which he issues at intervals setting forth and criticising the results of anthropological research. His own part of the present volume is a digest of this character, dealing principally with recent theories of the origin of totemism and of its relation to the exogamous divisions of tribal society. With those theories he connects a theory of the origin of society, propounded by his cousin, James Jasper Atkinson, now deceased, who lived long in New Caledonia. Native customs excited Mr. Atkinson's interest and led him to take up the study of anthropology, a fruit of which is the theory expounded in Primal Law.

Mr. Atkinson's speculations are connected with certain sections of Darwin's Descent of Man. In the preparation of that work Mr. Dar- win's attention was attracted by the discoveries made by Morgan, Lub- bock, and McLennan, as regards the constitution of primitive society. Mr. Darwin frankly declared himself (sees. 974-77) unable to conjec- ture how such social structure could have been evolved from such associa- tions as exist among man's cognates in the mammalia. Mr. Atkinson undertakes to explain the process by the aid of anthropological data, in the narrow sense of the term. He starts with animal groups such as are found among the higher mammalia as, for instance, a troop of baboons. Among these, as among the mammalia in general, the strongest male claims and holds by his individual prowess exclusive rights to the possession of the females. The young males are not driven out altogether, but remain members of the troop, keeping at a shrewd distance from the jealous male sovereign. Society was the result of an accommodation between the pretensions of the young males and the pretensions of their sire, so that the troop, instead of being a single marital group, became converted into a community compounded of marital groups. Primal Law is the male fiat which ordained the terms of this accommodation of interests, expressed in prohibitions from

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