Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/218

206 system before any other, and, the custom ceasing, the practice became wrong. So it is true to-day among Indians, as it was in a much more marked degree among the Israelites at the time of the compilation of the existing version of the Old Testament, that the marriage of a father and daughter is reprobated. In this connection it is instructive to notice that the Navajo have a myth, undoubtedly genuine, that in the old time one of their race took his daughter to wife, and their offspring became the ancestor of the Utes, the hereditary enemies of the Navajo. This is a parallel with the stigma inflicted upon the Moabites and Ammonites, who were the descendants of Lot and the enemies of the Israelites who wrote the history, but yet were recognized by the latter as of the same stock.

The part of the story of Lot as it appears in our version, which tends strongly to show its later manipulation, is that the authors of that version, having at that time the idea of a horrible incest, explained that the man, specially designated by tradition as eminently good, was guilty only because he was betrayed through intoxication. They were obliged, in accordance with one tradition, to make him the ancestor of Moab and Ammon. By another tradition he was left without any sons and no wife, the two daughters being all of his family who survived the destruction of Sodom. They reconciled their data, therefore, by the excuse of intoxication, but there was no occasion for such excuse. In the age to which the tradition related the transaction was perfectly proper, did not involve sexual passion, and was required by law to keep up the stock. The clan rules had been forgotten when the book of Genesis was written.

In the stage of barbarism the marriage of brother and sister was common all over the world. Where polygamy existed, as was the case among the Israelites, and probably among all the Indians, a man, according to the rules of the totemic system, could not marry into his own clan. If he took several wives, they would sometimes be of different clans, not only from his own, but from one another. In such cases, the child of the wife of clan A was not of the same clan as the child of the wife of clan B, and they could marry. The marriage of uterine brothers and sisters was not consistent with the clan rules.

Writers on the clan system have extolled it as a system showing profound physiological insight respecting the supposed evils of inbreeding; but the best and latest physiologists doubt whether inbreeding is bad, unless there is a taint of blood which should prohibit the marriage of either party to any one. A true understanding of the clan system would have shown that inasmuch as it certainly permitted marriage between a man and his half-sister, and between a man and his aunt, his father's sister, if not the