THEORIES OF PRIMITIVE MARRIAGE. 273 



line of his theory I disentangle, as well as I can, from statements 

 that are not altogether consistent. 



Scarcity of food led groups of primitive men to destroy female 

 infants ; because, " as braves and hunters were required and valued, 

 it would be the interest of every horde to rear, when possible, its 

 healthy male children. It would be less its interest to rear females, 

 as they would be less capable of self-support, and of contributing, by 

 their exertions, to the common good" (p. 165). 



Mr. McLennan next alleges that " the practice in early times of 

 female infanticide," " rendering women scarce, led at once to poly- 

 andry within the tribe, and the capturing of women from without" 

 (p. 138). 



Joined with a restatement of the causes we come upon an inferred 

 result, as follows : " The scarcity of women within the group led to a 

 practice of stealing the women of other groups, and in time it came 

 to be considered improper, because it was unusual, for a man to marry 

 a woman of his own group" (p. 289). Or, as he says on p. 140, 

 "usage, induced by necessity, would in time establish a prejudice 

 among the tribes observing it (exogamy) a prejudice, strong as a 

 principle of religion, as every prejudice relating to marriage is apt 

 to be against marrying women of their own stock." 



To this habitual stealing of wives, and restealing of them, as 

 among the Australians (p. 16), he ascribes that doubtful paternity 

 which led to the recognition of kinship through females only. 

 Though elsewhere admitting a more general cause for this primitive 

 form of kinship (p. 159), he regards wife-stealing as its most certain 

 cause , saying that " it must have prevailed wherever exogamy pre- 

 vailed exogamy and the consequent practice of capturing wives. 

 Certainty as to fathers is impossible where mothers are stolen from 

 their first lords, and liable to be restolen before the birth of children " 

 (p. 226). 



Assuming the tribes which thus grew into the practice of wife- 

 stealing to have been originally homogeneous in blood, or at least to 

 have supposed themselves so, Mr. McLennan argues that the introduc- 

 tion of wives who were foreigners in blood, joined with the rise of 

 the first definite conception of relationship (that between mother and 

 child) and consequent system of kinship exclusively in the female 

 line, led to recognized heterogeneity within the tribe : there came to 

 exist, within the tribe, children regarded as belonging by blood to 

 the tribes of their mothers. Hence arose another form of exogamy. 

 The primitive requirement that a wife should be stolen from another 

 tribe, naturally became confounded with the requirement that a wife 

 should be of the blood of another tribe; and hence girls born within 

 the tribe, from mothers belonging to other tribes, became eligible as 

 wives. The original exogamy, carried out only by robbing other 

 tribes of their women, gave place, in part, or wholly, to the modified 

 vol. x. 18 



