Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/285



has long been an accepted doctrine that among the similar customs found prevailing in distant countries, there are some which are evidence of worth to the ethnologist. But in dealing with these things he has to answer, time after time, a new form of the hard question that stands in his way in so many departments of his work. He must have derived from observation of many cases a general notion of what Man does and does not do, before he can say of any particular custom which he finds in two distant places, either that it is likely that a similar state of things may have produced it more than once, or that it is unlikely—that it is even so unlikely as to approach the limit of impossibility, that such a thing should have grown up independently in the two, or three, or twenty places where he finds it. In the first case it is worth little or nothing to him as evidence bearing on the early history of mankind, but in the latter it goes with more or less force to prove that the people who possess it are allied by blood, or have been in contact, or have been influenced indirectly one from the other or both from a common source, or that some combination of these things has happened; in a word, that there has been historical connexion between them.

I give some selected cases of the Argument from Similar Customs, both where it seems sound and where it seems unsound, before proceeding to the main object of this chapter, which is to select and bring into view, from the enormous mass of raw material that lies before the student, four groups of worldwide customs which seem to have their roots deep in the early history of mankind.