Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/525

 Correspondence. 489

reckoning descent in the male line. The "classes" become local communities ; it is " a far cry " to the region where legal brides can be found, as Mr. Howitt shows in several instances, and the class system is abandoned. Mr. Strehlow prints an Arunta legend that the Arunta were once in the condition of the people of York Peninsula, and that the "classes" then occupied each its own region, of which the boundaries are named. This would naturally occur if the Arunta had the four or eight class system with paternal descent of class and totem.

Both Dr. Westermarck and I, as Mr. Hartland says, "reject the hypothesis of primitive promiscuity." I merely follow Darwin, whose postulate "cannot be granted," says Mr. Hartland. But I do not know why it is worse than the opposite guess that man was originally gregarious. Both views, I have repeatedly said, are guesses. If his jealous solitude has arrested the evolution of the gorilla, our brute ancestors were not gorillas ; and Mr. Atkinson has sketched, I think, the probable way by which our advancing ancestors escaped from their solitude. Gregarious apes also had their evolution arrested, — if this means that they have not become human. I have heard that the male gorilla sleeps apart from his female mates, which looks as if he has taken a step in the right direction, but really about the intellect of the gorilla we seem to know very little. Give me original jealousy, — (its absence among some savages does not affect the question), — give me the solitary and hostile camps, and I can make a hypothesis of the origin of exogamy and totemism which has not a kink in it, and runs clean off the reel. But, on the opposite theory, what was the origin of exogamy? Why were any unions barred? Dr. Frazer resorts, as I once did, to some early superstition, but what was the origin of the superstition ? Mr. Hartland, like Mr. Spencer, resorts to a felt need of organisa- tion, of regulation " to prevent unceasing strife and the breaking up of the inchoate community " (p. 369). That is my own theory, but my community is the fire-circle, where the sire can easily execute his own Draconic rule. Mr. Hartland's inchoate com- munity is the "horde," (apparently the local tribe). Now, if the horde was a fairly large community, men might find mates in it who were neither their mothers nor uterine sisters ; unions with