belonging to the noblesse and a person belonging to the bourgeoisie (distinguished roughly from one another by the particle 'de') are wonderfully rare, though they are not unknown. The Church, it may be added, has repeatedly relaxed the 'exogamous' rule which forbids the intermarriage of near kin in order to save a member of a great Continental House from having to transgress the outer limit within which he is bound to marry.

I have a special reason for dwelling on the point. Exogamy plays a great part in the system of McLennan, and (though not under the same name) in the system of Morgan. Both hold that a definite stage of human development is marked by the appearance of a group which Morgan calls the Gens' and McLennan the 'exogamous totem-kin,' a body of kinsmen and kinswomen never intermarrying and witnessing to their kinship by a common mark on their persons. In so far as this group has fallen under actual observation, in America and Australia, it is more like a Sex than any other assemblage of human beings; it cannot reproduce itself unless it combines with some similar body, for the men cannot find wives nor the women husbands. Consequently it is always nowadays a part of some larger social aggregate. But, although I may not have clearly realised McLennan's conception, I understand him to consider that this group is the developed form of the

Q

independent primitive group, which he believes to have been an assemblage of men and much fewer women, living together in promiscuity, and therefore very unlike the Patriarchal or Cyclopean family assumed by the older theory. The fewness of women was produced by infanticide, and had for its consequence the habit of stealing women from other groups, still supposed to be witnessed to by the form of capture widely characterising the marriages of barbarians. Under the influence of this habit the practice of 'exogamy' was gradually created. On the other hand, Morgan, though he too believes the sexes to have originally lived together in promiscuity, does not seem to consider that their numbers were very unequal. He supposes that primitive men very early discovered the evils of close interbreeding, and that all the early transformations of human society were the results of a constant struggle to prevent these evils. In his view, therefore (as I understand it), the 'Gens,' as he rather unfortunately calls it (the exogamous totem-kin' of McLennan), is not a primitive group, but a mere subdivision of larger tribal societies originally promiscuous, formed for the purpose of limiting interbreeding.

6

For reasons which I have already given, I have no wish to take sides with Morgan or with McLennan, but it does seem to me that, if further inquiry should disclose the prevalence of an outer 'endogamous' as

well as an inner'exogamous' circle of consanguinity, it lends some strength to Morgan's theory of development, which is certainly easier to understand than McLennan's. I merely accept Morgan's theory so far as it is an explanation of the original formation of exogamous groups, and in so far as it considers them to have been subdivisions of larger communities, and formed for the purpose of limiting interbreeding. The difficulty which seems to be felt by candid opponents of this hypothesis is that primitive men are unlikely to have made any such physiological discovery. If it be true that interbreeding is an evil, its very truth, in their view, militates against the antiquity of human knowledge about it. Indeed it is not certain that it is true. Physiologists are not agreed as to Tables of Prohibited Degrees. Some no doubt would considerably extend them, but others deny that the evil which they prevent is of serious proportions. I think, however, it is forgotten that the assertion made by Morgan is made of a time when neither Surgery nor Medicine existed, of a time before that at which, according to the Greek tradition, Prometheus discovered the chopped herbs which were to be the remedy for human ailments. With the vast resources of modern medicine at hand, the evils of the intermarriage of near kin may have been reduced to a minimum or may have come to be doubted. But what is invaluable to a savage is, I take it, what we

should call a good constitution; such a constitution received at birth as will not easily admit disease, or will easily overcome it by its own native soundness. For among such men disease once contracted cannot be artificially cured. Even therefore if the advantage given by exogamous marriage to the children be now a slight one, it might be beyond price to primitive mankind. I cannot see why the men who discovered the use of fire and selected the wild forms of certain animals for domestication and of vegetables for cultivation should not find out that children of unsound constitutions were born of nearly related parents. If such children, left to themselves, are really weakly, the fact would be forced on notice by the stern process of natural selection, affecting either the individual or the tribe. It is this process which has produced those wonderful contrivances for the intercrossing of plants and the generation of a healthier vegetable offspring which have recently been observed by men of science; but if the process ever acted without check on mankind I should imagine that their earliest intelligence would enable them to note its operation. It should be added that the earliest serious attempts to combat disease appear to have taken the form of precautions, of training and of the formation of habits, rather than of remedies as now understood.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

NOTE A.

THE ANDAMAN ISLANDERS.

I AM afraid that I incurred some reproach by remarking in an earlier work ( Village Communities in the East and West') on the unconvincing character of much of the evidence for savage customs to which the utmost significance had been attributed, and by speaking of some of it as 'travellers' tales.' My observations on this evidence (which has since then considerably improved) were coupled with a statement that I expected much from the critical examination which was being given to savage or barbarous usage by officers of the Indian Government engaged in the administration of the so-called aboriginal races still numerous in India. The expectation has been abundantly fulfilled already, and I will instance one set of results.

I suppose that if there was one community which, looked at from a distance, or at occasional intervals, seemed more than others to constitute the 'missing link' between the brute and the man, it was the population of the Andaman Islands. In the Preface to Selections from Records of the Government of India (Home Department),' No. XXV., written before these islands were finally made the seat of a convict station, it is said that it is impossible to imagine any human beings to be lower in the scale of civilisation than are the Andaman savages. The little that is known of