Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/80

 *an opinion which is quite erroneous, as comparative ethnography irrefutably proves. Nothing is more common among primitive races than what is called Socratic love, and on this point I will briefly quote a few facts, without pausing longer on them than my subject requires. In the vast sociological investigation which I am undertaking, moral bestiality must not discourage scientific analysis any more than putrefaction arrests the scalpel of the anatomist; it does not therefore follow that we take delight in it.

As a matter of fact, many human races have practised, from the first, vices contrary to nature. The Kanaks of New Caledonia frequently assemble at night in a cabin to give themselves up to this kind of debauchery. The New Zealanders practised it even among their women. It was also a widely-spread custom throughout Polynesia, and even a special deity presided over it. In the whole of America, from north to south, similar customs have existed or still exist. We have previously seen that the Esquimaux reared young boys for this purpose. The Southern Californians did the same, and the Spanish missionaries, on their arrival in the country, found men dressed as women and assuming their part. They were trained to this from youth, and often publicly married to the chiefs. Nero was evidently a mere plagiarist. The existence of analogous customs has been proved amongst the Guyacurus of La Plata, the natives of the Isthmus of Darien, the tribes of Louisiana, and the ancient Illinois, etc.

The two chief forms of sexual excess of which I have been speaking, unnatural vice and the debauchery of girls or free women, are habitual in savage countries; and later, when civilisation and morality have evolved, the same inveterate inclinations still persist for a long time, in spite of public opinion and even of legal repression.

The Incas, according to the chronicler Garcilaso, were merciless in regard to these sexual aberrations, and the