Ancient Law in Modern Life. or by some analogous appellation. Marriage is strictly forbidden within the clan. Only a man from a neighboring or foreign clan is allowed to marry a lady rattle-snake or lady corn-stalk. And she will not go to him. If he wants to marry her he must come to live with her in her village, and throw in his lot with the rattle-snakes. This is the wellknown custom to which Mr. J. F. McLen nan gave the name exogamy, which is now generally adopted. Descent among the rattle-snakes is reckoned only in the female line. The children are rattle-snakes irre spective of the clan of their fathers. The imported husbands play their humble part in perpetuating the race of rattle-snakes, and have to drop into the ways of their wives' people. It is hardly possible for them to oppose the traditional policy of the rattle snakes, for they are so-many isolated units. One husband may be a fox by birth, and another a squirrel. And the foxes from time immemorial have had no dealings with the squirrels. If now and then a cantankerous husband tries to be aggressive, he is promptly brought to see that he is in a min ority of one. The rattle-snakes stand by each other through thick and thin, and every member of the clan is bound by all that is holy to take vengeance for a wrong done to a brother or sister rattle-snake. So among the North American Indians every nation was divided into a number of clans, and among most of the nations the rule is, or was, first, that no man could marry in his own clan, and, secondly, that every child belonged to the clan of its mother. (McLennan, Primitive Marriage, 96, Post, Grundriss, Vol. I, p. 71). It would be easy to multiply instances of the same rule. What is the explanation of reckoning kindred by the mother only, and not con sidering that a child was related to its father or its father's kin? The answer generally given is that it dates back to a time when even the wisest child did not know its own father. It is assumed that there was a time in the infancy of the race, when marriage
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had not been thought of. The wild men and women who wandered about the woods, picking up a precarious livelihood by killing game with the rudest weapons, formed ac cording to this theory no permanent al liances with each other. Sir John Lubbock, with commendable gallantry, speaks of the women as "communal wives." But some degree of specific appropriation seems to be implied in the word "wife," and the term marriage is inappropriate to describe the casual and fleeting relations between the sexes which are assumed to have been uni versal in primitive society. As Mr. Herbert Spencer puts it, "among low savages the re lations of the sexes are substantially like those common among inferior creatures/' (Principles of Sociology, 3d Ed., Vol. I, p. 600). Exclusive relationship by the mother is ascribed upon the theory to the uncer tainty of paternity. The well-known saying "maternity is a matter of fact; paternity is a matter of inference," appealed with ir resistible force to primitive mankind. Many modern writers have followed McLennan's view that all races began by counting kin dred by the mother's side only; that many races at a later date adopted the agnatic principle and reckoned kindred only by the father; and that still later some races came to admit relationship on the side of both parents equally. Dr. Post, one of the most recent and most learned of the German writers on this subject, goes even further. He says kinship by the female line only is everywhere the most ancient system; kin ship by both parents everywhere the most modern. Kinship by the male line only is everywhere more modern than kinship by the. female line only, and more ancient than kin ship by both parents. And probably kinship by females only, and then by males only, are stages through which all races have passed. (Grundriss, I, p. 661; McLennan, Primitive Marriage, 133). The passage from promiscuity, or more euphemistically, "communal marriage" to monogamy is bridged over by the curious
