THEORIES OF PRIMITIVE MARRIAGE. 277 



the Orinoco, Humboldt says: "It is most considerable among the 

 Caribs, and all the nations that have preserved the custom of carry- 

 ing off young girls from the neighboring tribes." How, then, can 

 wife-stealing be ascribed to scarcity of women ? 



A converse incongruity also militates against Mr. McLennan's 

 theory. His position is that female infanticide, "rendering women 

 scarce, led at once to polyandry within the tribe, and the capturing of 

 women from without." But polyandry does not, so far as I see, dis- 

 tinguish wife-stealing tribes. We do not find it among the above- 

 named Tasmanians, Austi*alians, Dakotas, Brazilians; and although 

 it is said to occur among the Fuegians, and characterizes some of the 

 Caribs, it is much less marked than their polygyny. Contrariwise, 

 though it is not a trait of peoples who rob one another of their women 

 it is a trait of certain rude peoples who are habitually peaceful. 

 There is polyandry among the Esquimaux, who do not even know 

 what war is ; there is polyandry among the Todas, who in no way 

 aggress upon their neighbors 



Other minor difficulties might be dwelt upon. There is the fact 

 that in many cases exogamy and endogamy coexist, as among the 

 Comanches, the New-Zealanders, the Lepchas, the Californians. There 

 is the fact that in sundry cases polygyny and polyandry coexist, as 

 among the Fuegians, the Caribs, the Esquimaux, the Warans, the 

 Hottentots, the ancient Britons. There is the fact that there are some 

 exogamous tribes who have not the form of capture in marriage, as 

 the Iroquois and the Chippewas. But, not dwelling on these, I turn 

 to certain cardinal difficulties, obvious a priori, which appear to me 

 insuperable. 



Setting out with primitive homogeneous groups, Mr. McLennan 

 contends that the scarcity of women caused by destruction of female 

 infants compelled wife-stealing ; and he thinks that this happened 

 "at a certain stage among every race of mankind" (p. 138). The 

 implication is, therefore, that a number of adjacent tribes, usually be- 

 longing to the same variety of .man in the same stage of progress, were 

 simultaneously thus led to rob one another. But immediately we think 

 of wife-stealing as a practice not of one tribe only, but of many tribes 

 forming a cluster, there presents itself the question, How was the 

 scarcity of women thus remedied ? If each tribe had fewer women 

 than men, how could the tribes get wived by robbing one another ? 

 The scarcity remained the same : what one tribe got another lost. 

 Bearing in mind the low fertility and great infant mortality among 

 savages, if there is a chronic deficiency of women and the tribes rob 

 one another equally, the result must be diminished population in all 

 the tribes. If some, robbing others in excess, get enough wives, and 

 leave certain of the rest with very few, these must tend toward ex- 

 tinction. And if the surviving tribes carry on the process, there 



