Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/113

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kindliness upon the giver. Here again the affection is ultimately due to close living together, and is further strengthened by it, as appears from the cooling effect of long separation of children from their parents. So also fraternal love and the duties and rights which have sprung from it depend in the first place on other circumstances than the idea of a common blood \ and the same may be said of the tie which binds together relatives more remotely allied. Its social force is ultimately derived from near relatives' habit of living together. Men became gregarious by remaining in the circle where they were born ; if, instead of keeping together with their kindred, they had preferred to isolate themselves or to unite with strangers, there would certainly be no blood-bond at all. The mutual attachment and the social rights and duties which resulted from this gregarious condition were associated with the relation in which the members of the group stood to one another, — the relation of kinship as expressed by a common name; and these associations might last even after the local tie was broken, being kept up by the common name. Even we ourselves are generally more disposed to count kin with distant relatives who have our own surname than with relatives who have a different name ; and still greater must be the influence which language in this respect exercises on the mind of a savage, to whom a person's name is part of his personality.

Here we have an immense group of facts which, though ulti- mately depending upon close living together, have been interpreted in terms of kinship. Why, then, could not the same have been the case with the aversion to incest and the prohibitory rules resulting from it? They really present a most striking analogy to the instances just mentioned. They have been associated with kinship because near relatives normally live together. They have come to include relatives more remotely allied who do not live together, owing to an association of ideas, especially through the influence of a common name ; clan exogamy has its counterpart, for instance, in the blood feud as a duty incumbent on the whole clan. But there are also cases in which marriages between un- related persons who have been brought up together in the same family, or who belong to the same local group, are held blamable or are actually prohibited ; and so there are, even in early society,