Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/316

290 said that Mr. Howitt is finally disposed of until some explanation more satisfactory than M'Lennan's be found of the recurrence of the appellatives Kubbi, Kapota, and the rest. That they are personal names, as M'Lennan insists, there does not appear any valid evidence to show. On the contrary, the evidence collected by Mr. Curr, who by no means accepts Mr. Howitt's theories, as well as by other enquirers, exhibits them as the names of exogamous classes. A theorist is apt to imagine that a single hypothesis will account for the universe. Mr. M'Lennan (who was a theorist, but a theorist in a really scientific manner) saw that if some of Mr. Morgan's classifications could be established his own hypothesis would only stand subject to qualifications and deductions. Hence (though doubtless in entire good faith) the bitterness wherewith he attacked Mr. Morgan and Mr. Howitt.

Another fault was pointed out ten or eleven years ago by Professor Tylor, in reviewing The Patriarchal Theory, a volume consisting of that part of Mr. J. F. M'Lennan's writings which his brother, Mr. Donald M'Lennan, edited and completed after his death. The M'Lennans were both lawyers, and they looked at the problems too much from a legal point of view. In controversy with Sir Henry Maine this led to too great a technicality. Professor Tylor called it—not altogether without reason—cutting hay with a penknife. A broader outlook was wanted; and the interests of the hypothesis were too prominent. In the present volume the characteristic of legalism is strongly marked. It causes the attention to be concentrated on forms and status and legal effects, to the disadvantage of the underlying ideas. But for this pre-occupation, so acute a man as Mr. M'Lennan could hardly have failed to grasp the importance of penetrating through the rights and duties of social life among savages down to the savage idea of kinship out of which they spring. And he might have divined that primary reason for reckoning kinship through women, which would have helped so much to give his theories strength and consistence, namely, that there was a time when paternity in general, as a physical fact, was unrecognised, and, even when it came to be recognised, was regarded as merely one of several possible causes of the existence of a child.

We do not mention these defects in M'Lennan's genius as a scientific investigator for the sake of fault-finding. We have too great a reverence for his memory. But because the book before