Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/242

204 Such are the facts. The conclusions are evident. Why these lamentations of the other sex, these secrets and mysteries? The ceremony of the initiation into manhood would have its actual meaning and would reach its aims without all those doings. Let us go further. Are these sham fights — now in a contradiction with the purposes of the ceremony — between the old people and the youth—not a survival of the real ones? Are these circumcisions, scars, cutting off fingers and other bloody customs not a survival of more serious wounds? The body of data I have collected and compared compels to answer positively. Yes, there, in some remote and obscure past, there was a stage in the evolution of the human society, when old men tolerated only little ones of their own sex in the horde. As the children were grown up and the sign of puberty appeared together with the male instincts, old people persecuted their future rivals and expelled them. Some tribal signs, now in use among the lower tribes, are probably of such an origin, and exist in the present as survivals of a half-animal past, i. e., the circumcision. The last operation possess very bloody forms in many cases; it is connected with loss of one testiculum in South Africa; the terrible rite in Central Australia is a horrible custom, the warriors who are present shed tears, and some authors (Mikhicho-Maclag) affirm that those subjected to it are probably often incapable of begetting children. We find the like spectacle and the same expulsion of the youth, as we contemplate the life of social mammalia. In the herds of guanacos, the mules persecute all young rivals and expel them out of the herd, when they begin to approach females. Such was the practice also in the primitive human horde. The rites of the initiation arose in later time, as a compromise between fighting males of different ages; male camps and club-houses appeared as an institution which permitted the youth to live in the community, but regulates their intercourse with the other sex in a manner more agreeable to the old people.

In my notes I have given only the general account of my studies on some absurd rites of the to-day savages. But there are other features connected with the seclusion of the youth. Young females of guanacos follow the expelled young males.