Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/527

 Correspondence. 491

jealousy. Our differences are caused solely by my preference of the Darwinian hypothesis to the apparent " weight of argument " on the other side. I don't see that the balance of conjecture tips over against Darwin. Again (p. 374) I have been obliged to abandon my old opinion that the toteraic taboo had any influence on exogamy, originally at least, for breach of rule of marriage entails no automatic penalty. The sin is a secular capital offence.

While Dr. Frazer holds that the primary phratriac rule was meant to bar unions of mothers and sons and of brothers and sisters uterine, which, with many non-consanguineous unions, it does prevent ; if I understand Mr. Hartland he thinks it was made to diminish by one half the opportunities for adultery. I may misconceive him, but I cannot accept the view as I understand it. The Australian's field of adultery is always as wide as his field of choice in marriage, and the injured husband is, if he pleases, his own avenger. The sin is not a secular capital offence against either the tribe or the phratry, or the totem kin, as is, or used to be, the breach of exogamous law.

We can never wholly agree while we start from opposite postulates. But if Mr. Hartland would construct a hypothesis colligating in sequence all the facts as he understands their evolution, from the primary rule made to diminish by one half the chances of strife caused by infringement of a man's right in his wife to the collapse of the whole system of exogamy, and explaining the normal division of the totem kins between the phratries, then his "suggestion" would thrive to the rank of a hypothesis.

A. Lang.

"MoMiA," A Ceremony of the Jews of Aleppo.

Sir Richard Burton, in the Appendix to his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (ed. 1898, vol. ii., pp. 344-5), quotes from The Navigation and vyages of Lewes Vertomanntis, Gentelman of the citie oj Rome, to the regions of Arabia, Egypte, Persia. . . In the year e of our Lorde 1503 (Trans.