Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/172

 I 56 TJie Orioiu of Exogamy and Tote??iism.

As to the origin of Exogamy, I conceive, (following Mr. Atkinson in his Primal Law), that man dwelt originally, as in Darwin's opinion, in small family groups, the Sires in each case expelling the young males when they were arriving at puberty. The Sires are the interested seniors for whom we are looking ! " The younger males, being thus expelled and wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close interbreeding within the limits of the sam.e family," says Darwin.^ The sire among horses, stags, (and gorillas, according to Darwin), thus expels the young males through no idea of "incest" in unions of brother and sister, mother and son, through no aversion to unions of persons closely akin by blood, but from animal jealousy. Darwin supposed that man did not cease to be fiercely jealous as he became human. The expulsion of young males was a practical enforcement of exogamy, of marriage out of the brutal herd, out of the savage camp.

As progress advanced, I conceive that the sire was moved, {by the tears, perhaps, of some female mate, in Mr. Atkinson's theory, and by a softening of his own heart, now becoming human), to let the son of his old age, his Benjamin, remain in the camp, so long as he did not interfere with any of the females, but found a mate outside the group. The custom of brother and sister avoidance, among tribes known to Mr. Atkinson in New Caledonia and other isles, seemed to him a result of this law. Mr. J. M. Robertson calls this idea " a violent assumption of a dramatic reconciliation effected by a mother between father and son on the basis of exogamy for the latter : we are unable to see how the happy solution was repeated all through the species." ^

Does not Mr. Robertson believe in the blessed words Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest } He appears to admit that " early man, like the gorilla and wild bull " (and many other animals) " of to-day, forcibly expelled or

^ Darwin, The Descerit of Man (2nd ed.), vol. ii., p. 395. ^ The Literary Guide, July, 1910, p. I02.