282 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cannot suppose coyness to be wholly absent. Hence that amount of 

 it which really exists, joined with that further amount simulated for 

 reputation's sake, will make resistance, and consequently capture, nat- 

 ural phenomena. Moreover, since a savage makes his wife a slave, 

 and usually treats her brutally, she has an additional motive for re- 

 sistance. 



Nor does forcible opposition pix>ceed only from the girl and her 

 female friends : the male members of her family also are likely to be 

 opponents. A woman is of value not only as a wife, but also as a 

 daughter; and all through, from the lowest to the highest stages of 

 social progress, we find a tacit or avowed claim to her services by her 

 father. It is so even with the degraded Fuegians : an equivalent in 

 the shape of service rendered has to be given for her by the youth, 

 " such as helping to make a canoe." It is so with numerous more ad- 

 vanced savages all over the world : there is either the like giving of 

 stipulated work, or the giving of a price. And we have evidence that 

 it was originally so among ourselves : in an action for seduction the 

 deprivation of a daughter's services is the injury alleged. Hence it is 

 inferable that in the rudest states, where claims, parental or other, 

 are but little regarded, the taking away of a daughter is likely to 

 become the occasion of a fight. Facts support this conclusion. Of the 

 Araucanians Smith tells us that, when there is opposition of the parents, 

 " the neighbors are immediately summoned by blowing the horn, and 

 chase is given." " Among the Gandors, a tribe on the southern shores of 

 the Caspian Sea, the bridegroom must run away with his bride, although 

 he thereby exposes himself to the vengeance of her parents, who, if 

 they find him within three days, can lawfully put him to death." And 

 we read concerning the Gonds that " a suitor usually carries off the 

 girl that is refused to him by the parents." Thus we find a further 

 natural cause for the practice of capture a cause which must have 

 been common before social usages were well established. Indeed, on 

 reading that among the Mapuches the man sometimes "lays violent 

 hands upon the damsel, and carries her off, " and that " in all such 

 cases the, visual equivalent is afterward paid to the girl's father," we 

 may suspect that abduction, spite of parents, was the primary form ; 

 that there came next the making of compensation to escape vengeance ; 

 that this grew into the making of presents beforehand; and that so 

 resulted eventually the system of purchase. 



If, then, within a tribe there are three sources of opposition to the 

 appropriation of a woman by a man, it does not seem that the form 

 of capture is inexplicable unless we assume the abduction of women 

 from other tribes. 



But even supposing it to have originated in the capture of foreign 

 women, its survival as a form of marriage would not prove exogamy 

 to have been the law. In a tribe whose warriors had many of them 

 wives taken from enemies, and who, as having captured their wives, 



