Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/119

Rh And yet we catch a glimpse here and there that there was some reason in most of that unreason; we see how sense dwindled away into non- sense, custom into ceremony, ceremony into farce." Now the very opposite of this argument holds good; the "sense" and the "custom" are found among savages; the "farce" and the "nonsense" are the relics of that once rational custom which survive in civilisation. For example, marriage by actual capture was once, apparently, a savage custom, rational and inevitable when women were scarce. In Sparta and Rome it dwindled into a ceremony; in modern society (if traces of it still exist) it survives as a farce—the farce of throwing old shoes at the departing couple, and the sham attacks among the old French, the Welsh, and other people.

We have to repeat that a judicious anthropologist does not regard "the surface of savage life" as "the very beginning of civilisation." In the matter of marriage there lies a perhaps inscrutable past behind the lowest forms of the rule of forbidden degrees. Still we know enough about the evolutions of marriage laws to say this much. The process of evolution has been from extreme complexity (still prevalent among savages) to the extreme simplicity of civilised laws of incest. The process can be traced, and it can be demonstrated that civilised societies show clear traces of having developed their marriage laws out of the marriage laws of savages. The laws begin in vast sweeping prohibitions of marriage, and they dwindle down to our rules of forbidden degrees in the prayer book. The Australians, as a general law, may not marry persons who bear the same family name, and revere the same animal or plant. But their laws are more complex still than this, and have still to be properly criticised. The same law—no marriage between man and woman of the same name—prevails among American Indians and other races. In these examples the family name is derived from the mother. Well, in India and China, we find the same sort of wide prohibition. People may not marry within the Gotra, or within the family name, though the family name is now derived through the father. Traces of the same rule may be found among the Romans, and, finally, Greece allowed marriages between brothers and sisters who had not the same mother,—that is, who at one time (when names were derived through the mother) had not the same family name. I have traced, in the article on the Family, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the gradual simplifying of the marriage law, and the gradual contraction of the prohibition. If