Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/33

 FAMILY 23 often the case in both instances (sic). In each case the group of men were conjointly married to the group of women. &quot;111. The Syndyasmian or Fairin(j Family. It was founded upon marriage between single pairs, but without an exclusive cohabita tion. The marriage continued during the pleasure of the parties. &quot;IV. The Patriarchal Family. 1 1 was founded upon the marriage of one man with several wives, followed in general by the seclusion of the wives. &quot;V. The Monogamian Family. It was founded upon marriage between single pairs with an exclusive cohabitation. &quot; Three of these forms, namely, the first, second, and fifth, were radical, because they were suflicently general and influential to create three distinct systems of consanguinity, all of which still exist in living forms. Conversely, these systems are sufficient of themselves to prove the antecedent existence of the forms of the family and of marriage with which they severally stand con nected.&quot; Mr Morgan makes the systems of nomenclature proofs of the existence of the Consanguine and Funaluan families. Unhappily, there is no other proof, and the same systems have been explained on a very different principle (M Lennan, Studies in Ancient History, p. 372-407). Looking at facts, we find the Consanguine family nowhere, and cannot easily imagine how early groups abstained from infringing on each other, and created a systematic marriage of brothers and sisters. St Augustine, however (De Civ. Dei, xv. 16), and Arclunus in his Thessalica (Odyssey, xi. 7, scholia B, Q) agree more or less with Mr Morgan. Next, how did the consanguine family change into the Punaluan 1 Mr Morgan says (Ancient Society, pp. 424, 428) brothers ceased to marry their sisters, because &quot; the evils of it could not for ever escape human observation.&quot; Thus the Punaluan family was hit upon, and &quot; created a distinct system of consanguinity&quot; (Ancient Society, p. 384), the Turanian. Again, &quot;marriages in Punaluan groups explain the rela tionships in the system.&quot; But (p. 386) Mr Morgan pro vides himself with another explanation, &quot; the Turanian system owes its origin to marriage in the group and to the gentile organization.&quot; He calls exogamy &quot;the gentile organization,&quot; though, in point of fact, the only gentes we know, the Roman gentes, show scarcely a trace of exogamy. Again, &quot; the change of relationships which resulted from substituting Punaluan in the place of Consanguine marriage turns the Malayan into the Turanian system&quot; (p. 442, see too p. 387). In the same page (442) Mr Morgan attri butes the change to the &quot; gentile organization,&quot; and, still in the same page, uses both factors in his working out of the problem. Now, if the Punaluan marriage is a sufficient ex planation, we do not need the &quot;gentile organization.&quot; Both, in Mr Morgan s opinion, were efforts of conscious moral reform. In Systems of Consanguinity (p. 490) the gentile organization (there called tribal), that is, exogamy, is said to have been &quot; designed to work out a reformation in the intermarriage of brothers and sisters.&quot; But the Punaluan marriage had done that, otherwise it would not have produced (as Mr Morgan says it did) the change from the Malayan to the Turanian system, the difference in the two systems, as exemplified in Seneca and Tamil, being &quot; in the relationships whbh depended on the intermarriage or non-intermarriage of brothers and sisters&quot; (Ancient Society, p. 442). Yet the Punaluan family, though itself a reform in morals and in &quot; breeding,&quot; &quot;did not furnish adequate motives to reform the Malay system,&quot; which, as we have seen, it did reform (p. 388). The Punaluan family, it is suspected, &quot; frequently involved own brothers and sisters &quot; (p. 427) ; had it not been so, there would have been no need of a fresh moral reformation,&quot; the gentile organization.&quot; Yet even in the Punaluan family (Ancient Society, p. 488) &quot; brothers ceased to marry their own sisters.&quot; What, then, did the &quot; gentile organization &quot; do for men ] As they had already ceased to marry their own sisters, and as, under the gentile organization, they were still able to marry their half-sisters, the reformatory &quot; in genuity &quot; of the inventors of the organizations was at once superfluous and useless. It is impossible to understand the Punaluan system. Its existence is inferred from a system of nomenclature which it does (and does not) produce ; it admits (and excludes) own brothers and sisters. Mr Morgan has intended, apparently, to represent the Puna luan marriage as a long transition to the definite custom of exogamy, but it will be seen that his language is not very clear nor his positions assured. He does not adduce sufficient proof that the Punaluan family ever existed as an institution, even in Hawaii. There is, if possible, a greater absence of historical testimony to the existence of the Consanguine family. It is difficult to believe that exogamy was a conscious moral and social reforma tion, because, ex hypothesi, the savages had no moral data, nothing to cause disgust at relations which seem revolt ing to us. It ii&amp;gt; as improbable that they discovered the supposed physical evils of breeding in and in. That dis covery could only have been made after a long experience, and in the Consanguine family that experience was impos sible. Thus, setting moral reform aside as inconceivable, we cannot understand how the Consanguine families ever broke up. Mr Morgan s ingenious speculations as to a tran sitional step towards the gens (as he calls what we style the totem-kindred), supposed to be found in the &quot; classes &quot; and marriage laws of the Kamilaroi, are vitiated by the weakness and contradictory nature of the evidence (see Pritchard, vol. ii. p. 492 : Lang s Queensland, Appendix ; Proceedings of American Academy of Arts, &amp;lt;tc., vof. viii. 412; Nature, October 29, 1874). Further, though Mr Morgan calls the Australian &quot;gentile organization&quot; &quot;in cipient,&quot; he admits (Ancient Society, p. 374) that the Nar- rinyeri have totern groups, in which &quot; the children are of the clan of the father.&quot; Far from being &quot; incipient,&quot; the gens of the Narrinyeri is on the footing of the ghotra of Hindu custom. Lastly, though Mr Morgan frequently declares that the Polynesians have not the gens (for he thinks them not sufficiently advanced), Mr Gill has shown that unmistakable traces of the totem survive in Poly nesian mythology. There is the less necessity to believe, with Mr Morgan, in the Punaluan and Consanguine families, because the evidence on which he relies, the evidence of the classi- ficatory system, has been explained on a different theory by Mr M Lennan (Studies in Ancient History, loc. cit.), whose mode of conceiving the evolution of the family is, briefly stated, this. Primitive man was, as geology reveals him, gregarious. Ye have no sort of evidence as to his truly primitive manners, for all existing savages havo had many ages of experience and, as it were, of education. It can hardly be supposed, however, that the earliest men had instinct against marriage with near kin. Their earliest associations would be based on the sentiment of kindred, not yet brought into explicit consciousness, and on community of residence. They would be named by the name of their group. The blood relation of the mother to the child would be the first they perceived. As time went on they could reason out other relationships through women, but male kinship would remain, though not unknown as a fact, unrecognized in custom, because, if harmony was to exist within the group, it could only be secured &quot;through indifference and promiscuity,&quot; which made certainty of male parentage impossible. Now let it be sup posed, as a vast body of evidence leads us to suppose, that female children were slaughtered as bouches inutiles. The result would be a scarcity of women within the group. To secure wives men would be obliged to steal them from other groups, which were, ex hypothesi, hostile. This is almost the state of things known to Montaigne (Cotton s translation, chap, xvii.), &quot;where the servile condition of women is