206 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



riage system before any other, and, the custom ceasing, the prac- 

 tice became wrong. So it is true to-day among Indians, as it "was 

 in a much more marked degree among the Israelites at the time of 

 the compilation of the existing version of the Old Testament, that 

 the marriage of a father and daughter is reprobated. In this con- 

 nection it is instructive to notice that the Navajo have a myth, 

 undoubtedly genuine, that in the old time one of their race took 

 his daughter to wife, and their offspring became the ancestor of 

 the Utes, the hereditary enemies of the Navajo. This is a parallel 

 with the stigma inflicted upon the Moabites and Ammonites, who 

 were the descendants of Lot and the enemies of the Israelites who 

 wrote the history, but yet were recognized by the latter as of the 

 same stock. 



The part of the story of Lot as it appears in our version, 

 which tends strongly to show its later manipulation, is that the 

 authors of that version, having at that time the idea of a hor- 

 rible incest, explained that the man, specially designated by tra- 

 dition as eminently good, was guilty only because he was betrayed 

 through intoxication. They were obliged, in accordance with one 

 tradition, to make him the ancestor of Moab and Ammon. By 

 another tradition he was left without any sons and no wife, 

 the two daughters being all of his family who survived the 

 destruction of Sodom. They reconciled their data, therefore, by 

 the excuse of intoxication, but there was no occasion for such 

 excuse. In the age to which the tradition related the transaction 

 was perfectly proper, did not involve sexual passion, and was 

 required by law to keep up the stock. The clan rules had been 

 forgotten when the book of Genesis was written. 



In the stage of barbarism the marriage of brother and sister 

 was common all over the world. Where polygamy existed, as 

 was the case among the Israelites, and probably among all the 

 Indians, a man, according to the rules of the totemic system, could 

 not marry into his own clan. If he took several wives, they 

 would sometimes be of different clans, not only from his own, but 

 from one another. In such cases, the child of the wife of clan A 

 was not of the same clan as the child of the wife of clan B, and 

 they could marry. The marriage of uterine brothers and sisters 

 was not consistent with the clan rules. 



Writers on the clan system have extolled it as a system show- 

 ing profound physiological insight respecting the supposed evils 

 of inbreeding ; but the best and latest physiologists doubt whether 

 inbreeding is bad, unless there is a taint of blood which should 

 prohibit the marriage of either party to any one. A true under- 

 standing of the clan system would have shown that inasmuch as 

 it certainly permitted marriage between a man and his half-sister, 

 and between a man and his aunt, his father's sister, if not the 



