Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/547

 Rh between people of different races is wholly ignored, though Mr. Crawfurd, from examples he found in the Malay Archipelago and elsewhere, deemed this intermarriage between different races to be one of the fundamental data for the proper consideration of ethnological problems, and Mr. Stuart Glennie has used the same argument, though without adducing any proof, in his racial hypothesis as to the origin of the matriarchate. One famous, though not pleasant detail in the history of marriage is dealt with by Mr. Westermarck with refreshing power, namely, the jus primæ noctis. Since Schmidt's work on the subject it has been assumed that there was nothing more to be said, but Mr. Westermarck proves that a review of this treatise is necessary in order to pick out what particular theory of feudal law Schmidt has succeeded in demolishing without necessarily destroying the evidence for a rule older than feudal law.

It is impossible to touch upon the question of the ethnology of custom and institutions without bearing in mind how much that subject came to the front at the recent Folk-lore Congress, and in the paper by Dr. Winternitz on Aryan marriage rites and ceremonies, a brave attempt was made to separate off from the collective body of marriage rules those which might with propriety be classed as Aryan. The point is one of some importance in view of such a treatise as Mr. Westermarck's. If ethnic peculiarities are stamped upon the rules of marriage, the fact supplies us with a strong argument for the position I have advanced, that marriage as an institution must be considered in conjunction with the institutions with which it is connected.

Mr. Westermarck lays great and very proper stress upon one such consideration in the history of marriage, namely, the effect of common residence in producing prohibitory laws against intermarriage. Now, close living together, in the sense supplied by Mr. Westermarck's admirably arranged evidence, is one of the most important elements in