Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/237

 SOME NOTES ON THE PRIMITIVE HORDE.

BY LUDWIG KRZYURCKI.

has introduced the term "Primitive Horde" into science. It has the right of citizenship therein, as a word which means the social organization of the human tribe in the remotest time, when our ancestors were living in the very low stage of culture. The term exists, but nothing moro is added to it. Only the biologists tried to throw a light upon this question, when studying the animal societies. Among the folk-lorists, I know but one note on the Primitive Horde, that of Mr. Gomme in the Journal of Anthr. Institute of Great Britain. Notwithstanding, I believe, the question can be explained and resolved only by the folk-lorist on the basis of ethnographical data. By the help of the statistical method, inaugurated by Mr. Tylor in his essay upon the primitive family, I have compared many rites of the most savage tribes. I am endeavoring to give here some conclusions, to which I am conducted by my studies.

Among the islanders of the Pacific and in other neighboring countries, we find this peculiar custom, that the sexes live in the utmost separation, and the men possess a special organization of club-houses. "Idolatry" so narrates W. Ellis "had exerted all its withering and deadly infiuence, not only over every moment of their earthly existence, but every department of life, destroying, by its debasing and unsocial dictates, every tender feeling and all the enjoyments of domestic intercourse. The father and the mother, with their children, never, as one social happy band, surrounded the domestic hearth, or, assembling under the grateful shade of the verdant grove, partook together, as a family, of the bounties of Providence. . . . The institutes of Oro and Tane inexorably required not only that the wife should not eat those