Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/434

 392 Reviews.

precisely the same results as inheritance from the mother, and it is by no means a rare type of succession.

Now, when Dr. Frazer comes to explain how totems, caused as he suggests, became hereditary, he has Httle difficulty in showing that community of interests bind a man and his children, especially his sons, together; but it is by no means apparent why a mother should desire to hand on her totem to her children. Dr, Frazer, in giving this desire of the mother as the only explanation, appears therefore to pass too easily over a crucial point. Hold- ing, as he does, that the classes in some cases preceded hereditary totems, it is perhaps singular that our author has not suggested that the totem became hereditary in matrilineal tribes on the analogy of the classes, for the female descent of which a reason can more readily be given.

As to the origin of exogamy, we have already seen that Dr. Frazer is no more explicit than as to the origin of the hereditary principle of totemism in matrilineal tribes. There are many other debateable points in his discussion of exogamy, but only a few can be selected. On some points the author's views have clearly undergone fluctuations.

In Dr. Frazer's final statement of his theory exogamy originates because the community thinks that sexual unions between near kin are hurtful and injurious to the common weal; on p. 109, however, he speaks of the germ of exogamy as a dread or aversion to sexual unions with certain persons, — an entirely different view, which is rejected on p. 155.

Again, it is pointed out repeatedly that exogamy prevents the marriage, not only of consanguineous relatives, but also of tribal kinsmen bearing the same terms of relationship. In the text of volume i. the author makes these classificatory relationships the primary ones ; in a note in the last volume, however, he modifies this view, and explains that the simplest consanguineous relationships were known to the authors of exogamy, who extended them into the classificatory system.

Now, in view of the fact that Dr. Frazer maintains, (vol. i., pp. 399 et seq.), with some emphasis that the object of exogamy was to prevent the marriage between tribal relatives, this is a rather surprising volte-face; for, according to the author's later view,