Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 35.djvu/216

 feud with the Gordons of Lochinvar, one of whom killed Thomas Maclellan of Bombie at the door of St. Giles's Church, Edinburgh, on 11 July 1526, was still alive, and on 26 Feb. Maclellan and Sir Robert Gordon were on this account summoned before the council (ib. p. 57), both having finally to find caution in 1,000l. to keep the peace (ib. p. 84). Various other entries in the Register of the Privy Council 'bear witness to the turbulent and lawless life of Maclellan.'

Maclellan was gentleman of the bed-chamber both to James I and Charles I. Crawfurd states that he was knighted by James I, and by Charles I created a baronet (Peerage of Scotland, p. 239). On the occasion of the coronation of Charles I at Edinburgh in 1633, he was on 25 May created a peer of Scotland by the title Lord Kirkcudbright to him and his heirs male bearing the name and arms of Maclellan. Kirkcudbright was a representative elder to the general assembly in 1638, and during the discussion on the king's 'large declaration' advised that those who had been guilty of so gross an outrage in the king's name should 'have their heads cut off for their paines' (, Scots Affairs, iii. 52). He died in 1641. By his first wife, Margaret, sixth daughter of Sir Matthew Campbell of Loudoun, he had a daughter, Anne, married to Sir Robert Maxwell of Orchardtoun. By his second wife, Mary Montgomery, daughter of Hugh, viscount Airds, he left no issue. He was succeeded in the baronage by his nephew, Thomas, son of his younger brother, William. On the death of the ninth Lord Kirkcudbright, on 19 April 1832, the title became extinct.



McLENNAN, JOHN FERGUSON (1827–1881), sociologist, born at Inverness on 14 Oct. 1827, was son of John McLennan, insurance agent, of Inverness, and Jessie Ross, his wife. Educated at Inverness and at King's College, Aberdeen, where he graduated M.A. in 1849, he subsequently entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1853 he obtained a wrangler s place in the mathematical tripos. Leaving Cambridge University without a degree, he spent two years in London writing for the 'Leader,' then edited by [q. v], and other periodicals. On returning to Edinburgh he was called to the bar in January 1857. He became secretary to the Scottish Law Amendment Society, and took an active part in the agitation which led to the Court of Session Act of 1868, and in 1871 he accepted the Eost of parliamentary draughtsman for Scotland. The onerous duties of the latter office he discharged for some years ably and conscientiously.

In 1857 appeared his first considerable literary effort, the article on 'Law' in the 'Encyclopædia Britannica' (8th edition). In the course of the researches into ancient institutions which it involved, McLennan was led to speculate on the origin of the curious custom of marriage by collusive abduction, which obtained in historic times, both at Sparta and at Rome, and conjectured that it was a relic of an archaic custom of marriage by actual abduction, or 'capture.' Further research led him to the conclusion that primitive society consisted of miscellaneous hordes, recognising no ties of kinship, practising promiscuous sexual intercourse and female infanticide, and thus compelled to prey upon one another for women. Hence was established within each horde a custom of having sexual intercourse with none but alien women (exogamy), which acquired a religious or quasi-religious sanction, and survived into historic times. In course of time uterine—but at first only uterine—kinship came to be recognised, and with its recognition abduction gave place to the more genial practice of the reception of paramours by women under the maternal roof, which, from its prevalence among the Nairs, McLennan terms Nair polyandry. This among the more progressive races was succeeded by polyandry of the type found in Tibet, where several brothers have a wife in common who accordingly passes into their family, and this again by patriarchal monandry, polygamous or monogamous according to circumstances.

In support of this very bold hypothesis McLennan marshalled a considerable mass of evidence in an ingenious but somewhat confused and fragmentary essay, entitled 'An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies,' Edinburgh, 1865, 8vo. Though anticipated to some slight extent by the Swiss jurist Bachofen (see Das Mutterrecht. Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach über religiosen und rechtlichen Natur, Stuttgart, 1861, 4to), McLennan's work was the result of altogether independent thought and research, and of the importance of the facts which for the first time it brought together there has never been any question. On the other hand, the theory of the evolution of marriage which he sought to base upon them has met with little favour, and may be said to be now generally rejected by sociologists. It gave, however, an immense impetus to