Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/446

 4IO Lord Avebury on Marriage^

Lord Avebury seems to use "horde" and " family " as synonymous terms. "A man was first regarded as merely related to his family" (p. loi). Children were " regarded only as part of the horde" (p. 99). I do not know what is meant by "family" (p. loi). Lord Avebury uses the term to denote the children of "individuals " (p. 87), or of a " man " (p. 97). If a "horde," then, be a "family," and if a "family" be " the children of a man," where is communal marriage ? In place of " communal marriage" we have here the Patri- archal system, and full recognition of paternity.

Lord Avebury, as far as I can understand him, offers at once two contradictory theories. In one, totemism arose in the inheritance by a man's children of his personal name, an animal name. By the other theory, totemism arose before any degrees of consanguinity were known. All members of a "horde" were called by the horde-name, Bear or Lion, — and why was the horde named Lion or Bear }

Here Lord Avebury appears to have an answer, but it is not the answer that he gives, for example, on pp. 87, 97. In the new answer, children, families, and fathers - are omitted. In the elder answer, they were essential. " My suggestion was," he says (p. 98), " that if a group was led by a man who had been named after an animal, the members of the group took the same name," Lion or Kangaroo. Here the term "group" supplants the terms "horde" and ^'family," and the " father " of p. 97 becomes the "leader" of p. 98. Further reply, if I understand my author, is superfluous.

Lord Avebury's theory of totemism is, as far as I can see, a combination of two contradictory hypotheses ; thus it needs drastic modifications before it can be discussed with any profit. Moreover it does not explain the existence of totem-kins within each phratry whose members may not marry each other. No man or woman, say, of Frog totem, in phratry Crow, may marry a member of Crow, Snipe, Duck, Carpet Snake, Frog, or any other totem, within their