Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/530

 494 Correspondence.

With Mr. Rose's " On the Alleged Evidence for Mother-Right in Early Greece " I agree completely except in one important and dubious matter. He does not notice Prof. Murray's statement that, " if we may believe some of the ablest of modern inves- tigators," the ancient worship of the Kore, (who may be a bride and a mother,) "was bound up with the influences of daily domestic life" among the pre-Hellenic peoples {The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907), p. 74). The Achseans were patrilineal and patriarchal. Among the pre-Hellenic peoples " the father did not count, at least not primarily, in the reckoning of relationship. He did count for something, since exogamy, not endogamy, was the rule." The last statement I do not understand, but how do we know that " exogamy was the rule," and that pre-Hellenic Greece was matrilinear ? I do not think that the legendary sons " ruling anywhere but in their fathers' kingdoms" suggest exogamy, which, of course, has nothing to do with marriages of women to foreigners, any more than do the marriages of European Royal Families or of the Norman adventurers. But investigators who differ from Mr. Rose and me think that the foreign marriages of the wandering princes in mdrche?i are traces of exogamy.

As to naming eldest sons after the paternal grandfather, it has been the unbroken rule in my family for two centuries or more, and is not " a direct result of our belief in reincarnation combined with matrilinear exogamy."

What I do not feel sure of is (p. 277) that "the form of family in which the wife does not leave her old home but stays there with her children, being simply visited by the husband," is " very early," Are there examples of this rule in Australia? With reckoning in the female Hne the young men do not "go too far away " to seek a bride. People of each phratry and totem kin, the accessible brides, are all near neighbours, all mixed up together, under a matrilinear reckoning. Their local segrega- tion occurs only under male reckoning of descent of totem and phratry.

A. Lang.