Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/173

 The Origin of Exogainy and Totetnisni. 157

slew liis male young when they aroused his jealousy." If early man did so, man not so early left off doing so, certainly; and for that he must have had some reason, and some early men must have begun the practice of permitting the young males to remain in the camp or fire-circle, but not to choose a mate within it. They were of milder mood ; the mothers, too, were growing more maternal ; had it not been so, we should all be more brutal than we are at this moment. Then came in Natural Selection. Groups which contained several fine young males would be " the fittest," would over- come in all encounters groups with only one male, perhaps a tottering old male ; and the fittest groups would survive. The reform would be imitated by other groups till " the happy solution was repeated all through the species."

Mr. Atkinson merely gave dramatically, in his remarks on the mother, son, and sire, an example of the way in which advancing humanity might modify the old brutal custom.

My theory is practically that of Mr. Atkinson. The expulsion of the young sons by the sire was his unspoken enforcement of exogamy. The idea is Darwin's, it is not that of an amateur naturalist : hypnotised by no belief in the promiscuity of the earliest men. With them, solitary and fierce, my theory of exogamy begins.

Mr. Howitt, if I understand his meaning, thought that exogamy arose in a society which, save for exogamy, was as advanced as that of an Australian tribe of to-day. After quoting two tribal legends of the rise of exogamy, (legends of an opposite sort are ignored), from the dividing of the tribe into phratries, " with intent to regulate the relations of the sexes," Mr. Howitt, says, " I can see very clearly how such a social change might be brought about. . . . Such a man," (a voyant, a medicine-man), "if of great repute in his tribe, might readily bring about a social change, by announc- ing to his fellow medicine-men a command received from some supernatural being such as Kutchi of the Dieri,