210 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for husbands ? Say, for instance, that a number of Derbet girls are 

 left uncaptured by the Torgots, who have secured their full comple- 

 ment of wives. What is to be done with them ? They can not marry 

 within their own tribe, for the tribe is exogamous. The Derbets must 

 be in this perplexing strait : either they must give these women away 

 to the Torgots which would be a method of wife-procuring other 

 than capture or they must capture Torgot young men as husbands 

 for those damsels, and forcibly adopt them into their own tribe. 



Mr. McLennan's theory of marriage by capture, therefore, requires 

 either 



1. That all the women of a tribe shall be captured by another tribe ; 

 or 



2. That men shall be captured for husbands, as well as women for 

 wives. Surely, when a theory brings us to a conclusion such as this, 

 it were better to lay it aside. 



The Kocchs and the Hos, brought forward in evidence by Mr. 

 McLennan in a subsequent chapter, are useless witnesses to him, be- 

 cause, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, " they are divided into 

 keelis, or clans, and may not take to wife a girl of their own keeli." * 



Concerning the Khonds, Major McPherson's statement, quoted by 

 Mr. McLennan, is that " intermarriage between persons of the same 

 tribe'''' (the italics are mine), "however large or scattered, is considered 

 incestuous and punishable by death." This does not prove that no 

 Khond can marry a Khond and nothing less than this is required by 

 Mr. McLennan's theory. It simply points to the fact that the Orissa 

 Khonds are divided into exogamous clans, and that men and women 

 of the same clan are tribal brothers and sisters. 



Taking the term " exogamous tribe " to mean an exogamous com- 

 munity complete in all its parts, and forbidding marriage everywhere 

 within its limits (the sense in which Mr. McLennan's theory requires 

 it to be used with regard to the cases cited by him in his fifth chapter), 

 I do not hesitate to say that nowhere on the face of the earth has such 

 a tribe been found at the present day ; and that we have no trust- 

 worthy record of any such tribe having existed in bygone days. All 

 the savage communities with which we have anything like a full 

 acquaintance are made up of exogamous intermarrying divisions, and 

 consequently do not forbid marriage everywhere within their own 

 limits. Such a community may properly be said to be endogamous 

 as regards itself, if it forbids or at least discourages marriage beyond 

 its own boundaries (as is frequently we may say generally the case), 

 though its law of marriage can not be said to be endogamous, because 

 its clans are strictly exogamous. There is no instance, as far as I 

 know, of any such endogamous tribe which is not divided into exoga- 

 mous clans. If we could find such a tribe, we should find what has 

 been diligently sought for in vain for the last thirty years and more. 

 * " Origin of Civilization," second edition, p. 117. 



