Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/549

 Rh vital question of the starting point of human society, because it is conceivable that if Mr. Westermarck had continued his view somewhat further, instead of stopping short at the temporary connection between the sexes, he would have seen that the local group was the necessary antecedent to even that temporary connection. We implicitly follow his lead to the next stage, where he detects that the “sociability of man sprang in the main from progressive intellectual and material civilisation”, and we are prepared to cut out communal marriage from the series of early developments of marriage forms, and translate it to a place where it must be considered the special outcome of marriage considered from its institutional side. On the remaining points he has considered, all we have to observe is that they belong rather to the natural history of marriage than to the institutional, and that while they exhaust all that is to be said, at all events for some time to come, under that head, they form only a part of the history of human marriage as a whole—a necessary and vital part—which must be studied and understood before the other part should be approached.

To pass from Mr. Westermarck to Mr. Stuart Glennie is to emphasise the fact that while the former bases his researches upon a wide and exhaustive series of minute details, carefully arranged and tabulated, the latter bases his researches upon brilliant suggestions coupled with an intense belief in the validity of his arguments, without the necessity of providing proofs. One should always be grateful for suggestions. That somewhere in the history of marriage Mr. Stuart Glennie’s conception of the matriarchate will find a place is, I venture to think, certain. But what place? is the all-important question. With Mr. Nutt’s and Mr. Jacobs’ criticisms in these pages I agree on the whole. Undoubtedly the facts of ethnology must be brought into the question of the origin of marriage institutions; undoubtedly the conquest and serfdom of a people is a factor to be reckoned with,