Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 17, 1906.djvu/35

 Presidential Address. 25

know. If there are questionable points here and there, so there are in all other views. We have to assume a good deal on Mr. Frazer's hypothesis, as on Mr. Lang's. It does in fact cause a qualm of misgiving, when we perceive how the same facts are used by so many students to support hypotheses diametrically opposed. Here in Mr. Lang's argument, I confess to another qualm at the thought of those young persons, who migrated from one phratry to another to avoid compul- sory celibacy. Did that really satisfy their consciences } How was it that none made a firm stand against their fate .'' No stories, so far as I am aware, describe the stolen loves of an aboriginal Abelard and Heloise, or passive resistance to the death of such unnatural laws. If the elders of the tribes met in conclave, and played at chess with their pawns, did not they strike a blow at the root of all belief in right or wrong .■* Then again, man may be jealous now, but so also I believe is woman; and if we may assume a dozen or a hundred happy wives in a domestic establishment, we assume an absence of jealousy almost as great as that of group-marriage. Not all animals are jealous : bulls may be so, but not so apparently dogs and cats. What of female infanticide.'' What of the problems caused by scarcity of food ? Again, granting the jealousy, granting the sultan and his hareem, it is a long step from these hareem-groups to any sort of social or tribal organisation. I very much doubt also if one sultan, without janissaries, could keep his hareem from running away. The sultans cannot have all been highly lovable, nor could they have been everywhere at once. But the most awful shock of all is to see, that the hareem hypothesis gives the deathblow to the hypothesis of female kinship on which it is built. How can the paternity of a child be in doubt (supposing the savages to have any idea of paternity) if there is only one sultan .'* There is much more likelihood of the babies all getting