Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/298

288 Lastly, restrictions from marriage are occasionally found applied to cases where the relationship is more or less imaginary; as in ancient Rome, where adoption had in some measure the effect of consanguinity in barring marriage; or among the Moslems, where relation to a foster-family operates more fully in the same way; or in the Roman Church, where sponsorship creates a restriction from marriage, even among the co-sponsors, which it requires a dispensation to remove. Again, two members of a Circassian brotherhood, though no relationship is to be traced between them, may not marry, and even among the savage Tupinambas of Brazil, two men who adopted one another as brothers were prohibited from marrying each other's sisters and daughters. But such practices as these may reasonably be set down as mere consequences of the transfer both of the rights and the obligations of consanguinity to other kinds of connexion, and so do not touch the general question.

To consider now the third group of customs, it is natural enough that there should be found even among savage tribes rules concerning respect, authority, precedence, and so forth, between fathers- and mothers-in-law and their sons- and daughters-in-law. But with these there are found, in the most distant regions of the world, regulations which to a great extent coincide, but which lie so far out of the ordinary course of social life as understood by the civilized world, that it is hard even to guess what state of things can have brought them into existence.

Among the Arawaks of South America, it was not lawful for the son-in law to see the face of his mother-in-law. If they lived in the same house, a partition must be set up between them. If they went in the same boat, she had to get in first, so as to keep her back turned towards him. Among the Carib, Rochefort says, "all the women talk with whom they will, but the husband dares not converse with his wife's relatives, except on extraordinary occasions." Further north, in the