"The sister of the emperor appears in public mounted on a mule richly caparisoned, having by her side her women bearing a daïs over her. From four to five hundred women surround her, singing verses in her praise, and playing the tambour in a lively and graceful manner."[1] And at the present time, among the Malagasy nobility, marriage between brother and sister is very common.[2]
There is certainly nothing farther from exogamy than marriages between brothers and sisters; but, to say the truth, there is no logical and necessary connection between the form of filiation and exogamic or endogamic customs.
The Malagasy contract what we should call incestuous marriages, while preserving maternal filiation; the Arabs and Kabyles, on the contrary, in obedience to the prescriptions of the Koran, have a horror of incest. The sacred book prohibits a man from taking to wife his mother, daughter, sister, his paternal or maternal aunt, his grand-*daughter, his mother-in-law, his daughter-in-law, or even his nurse and foster-sister. A man was not to marry two sisters at the same time.[3] This is indeed a limited exogamy; and yet the Koran establishes the paternal and even patriarchal family very clearly. The study of the family in Malaya and among the aborigines of India will complete the proof that in the same country, and in the same race, various systems of marriage, family, and filiation, may coexist, and that consequently we must guard against formulating too strict sociological laws in regard to them.
III. The Family in Malaya.
At Sumatra there were three kinds of marriages—1st, the wife, or rather the family of the wife, bought the man, who henceforth became her property, worked for her, possessed nothing of his own, was liable to be dismissed, and could commit no fault without the proprietary family being responsible for it, exactly as the Roman master answered for
