SURVIVALS FROM MARRIAGE BY CAPTURE. 207 

 SURVIVALS FROM MARRIAGE BY CAPTURE. 



By Lieutenant-Colonel A. B. ELLIS. 



AMONG those races of man which have made the least prog- 

 ress in civilization we find that the men of a group or com- 

 munity are in the habit of procuring wives by seizing and carry- 

 ing off the women of other groups or communities. It is the 

 practice, for instance, among the Fuegians, the Australians, the 

 tribes of the Amazon, some of the aborigines of the Deccan, several 

 of the Malay peoples of the Indian Archipelago, many African 

 tribes, and other peoples too numerous to be here given in detail. 

 Shortly summarized, it may be said that the practice is caused by 

 the scarcity of women, which results from female infanticide, 

 which in its turn is due to the struggle for existence, necessarily 

 hard among savage races who trust wholly to the chase and the 

 spontaneous fruits of the earth for their supply of food. Wher- 

 ever man lives under such precarious conditions each extra mouth 

 to fill becomes a matter for serious consideration, and as male in- 

 fants, future hunters and braves, are of more value to the group 

 than female, the latter are slain in a larger proportion. As man 

 emerges from these conditions and cultivates the soil or domesti- 

 cates animals, the struggle for existence becomes less hard, infan- 

 ticide diminishes, and the sexes become more equally balanced. 

 But the former condition lasts long. It is probably within the 

 mark to say that several centuries passed away before man com- 

 menced to till the soil, and many more before he began to domes- 

 ticate animals ; and during the whole of this time, to judge the 

 past by the present, he probably obtained wives by capture from 

 his neighbors. 



Now, after man had for a great number of generations been in 

 the habit of associating marriage with a violent abduction of 

 women, he would inevitably come to regard the two as necessary 

 complements of each other. Man is a creature of habit, and con- 

 tinually perseveres in old customs when their necessity has long 

 passed away, and when even their meaning and intention have 

 been forgotten. Hence, as he has been in the habit of seizing 

 women for wives, he would, even when the necessity for violence 

 no longer existed, still continue to preserve at least the form of it ; 

 regarding the acquisition of a wife without some semblance of 

 force as improper, because unusual, and at variance with old cus- 

 tom. As time passed on, this form, or rite, of capture would 

 necessarily become disintegrated, passing from an actual capture 

 to a symbolic capture, and finally dwindling away into a variety 

 of minor ceremonies. These, which we may call forms of survival 



