Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/545

 Rh inquiry, and which make up unities in anthropological data. The smaller inside groups are formed by causes, and kept up by causes, of which at present we know but little, except that they are dependent upon the larger local group; they are not primary, but secondary phenomena in the history of institutions.

Given, then, the local group with no tribal organisation, Mr. Westermarck's evidence does not greatly alter Mr. McLennan's conception of the horde, if we cut out of the equation Mr. McLennan's unfortunate and misleading use of the term promiscuous. Temporary monandry within the local horde is the feature which Mr. Westermarck's evidence leads us to identify as the earliest form of human association.

Of the tremendous step from this to tribal society based upon blood kinship, Mr. Westermarck finds little to say, except by way of criticism of Mr. McLennan's theories. But in this criticism the point is missed, that, although the fact of blood kinship between both parents and offspring could never have been unknown to man, the use of that fact for the purposes of social organisation is altogether a different matter. At this stage human marriage enters into close and intimate relationship with other social institutions—it is, in point of fact, for the first time an institution, a custom, that is, used by man for social or political organisation. And at this stage I venture to think marriage cannot be scientifically considered apart from its surroundings in the society of which it forms a part.

If these remarks express one of the critical objections against Mr. Westermarck's method, let it not be understood that they are intended to go further than to point out what is conceived to be an omission from a work which is called History of Human Marriage—an omission which might yet be supplied from the data given by Mr. Westermarck himself All that can be said on marriage in its several forms, real and symbolical, seems to have been said