Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/246

Rh man told me: "Always we give food from our hand to the child to eat, we give fruit and dainties, we give betel nut. This makes the child as it is."

I also discussed the existence of half-castes with my informants, children of white traders married to native women. I pointed out that some look much more like natives than like Europeans. This, again, they simply denied, maintaining stoutly that all these children have white men's faces, and giving this as another proof of their doctrine. There was no way of shaking their conviction, or of diminishing their dislike of the idea that anyone can resemble his mother or her people, an idea condemned by the tradition and the good manners of the tribe.

Thus we see that an artificial physical link between father and child has been introduced, and that on one important point it has overshadowed the matrilineal bond. For physical resemblance is a very strong emotional tie between two people, and its strength is hardly reduced by its being ascribed, not to a physiological, but to a sociological cause—that of continued association between husband and wife.

I have to record one more important assertion of father-right in this matrilineal society, one of a purely social and economic nature. That there is a compromise between the two principles of matriliny and paternal influence in social and economic matters, we have already seen; but it is worth while to restate this briefly here, and to mention its most peculiar feature.

The matrilineal principle is maintained by the more Rh