Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/224

Rh examples of childless persons renowned for profligacy, or of women who lived with one white trader after another without having any baby.

Although I was never afraid of using a leading question, or of eliciting the natives' point of view by contradicting it, I was somewhat astonished at the fierce opposition evoked by my advocacy of physiological paternity. Only late in my Trobriand career did I find out that I was not the first to attack this part of native belief, having been preceded by the missionary teachers. I speak mainly of the coloured ones; for I do not know what attitude was taken by the one or two white men who were in charge of the mission before my time, and those who came to the islands while I was there only held office for a short period and did not go into such details. But all my native informants corroborated the fact, once I had discovered it, that the doctrine and ideal of Paternity, and all that tends to strengthen it, is advocated by the coloured Christian teachers.

We must realize that the cardinal dogma of God the Father and God the Son, the sacrifice of the only Son and the filial love of man to his Maker would completely miss fire in a matrilineal society, where the relation between father and son is decreed by tribal law to be that of two strangers, where all personal unity between them is denied, and where all family obligations are associated Rh