OP ARTS AND SCIENCES: MARCH 12, 1872. 425 



tribes. They resolve the people into groups of brothers and sisters ; 

 and by a second grouping, with respect to marriage, a conjugal system 

 was established but little short of promiscuity. The resulting family 

 was communal, and coextensive with the range of the privileges, but 

 broken up into smaller communal families consisting of such persons as 

 were immediately associated for mutual protection and subsistence. 

 The classes, founded upon sex, the first and most obvious division of 

 the species, was perhaps the germ of the tribe founded upon con- 

 sanguinity. The true family, resting upon marriage between one 

 man and one woman, with an exclusive cohabitation, was neither con- 

 ceivable nor attainable in savage life. Man was still perceptibly gre- 

 garious, with an irresistible tendency toward communism in wives and 

 in living, but, under the teachings of experience, with some measure 

 of restriction as to numbers of the former. 



This division into male and female classes, with a prohibition of the 

 intermarriage of brothers and sisters, shows plainly enough that such 

 marriages were common anterior to the establishment of the classes, and 

 that the classes owe their origin to a desire to break up the practice. 

 The tribal organization embodies the same prohibition as its central 

 idea ; whence the inference from each source that such marriages were 

 normal in the previous period. Moreover, the classes did not look be- 

 yond this result ; for we have seen that it compels in-and-in marriages 

 beyond this degree by positive institution. If any doubt could rest 

 upon this question, it is entirely removed by the Malayan system of 

 consanguinity, which is decisive and in point.* 



When the two original tribes came in over the classes, with the pro- 

 gress of experience, no substantial change was effected in the previous 

 condition. The subsequent division of these tribes into six, with the 

 maintenance of the same law of marriage and descents, left the social 

 condition essentially the same ; except, by retaining larger numbers of 

 people under a common tribal system, it brought persons more dis- 

 tantly connected into the marriage relation. This was a beneficial ten- 

 dency. The next movement was more important, namely, allowing the 

 tribes which were subdivisions of an original one, to marry into each 

 other. Although tribally brothers and sisters, they had been separating 

 in degree through as many centuries as had elapsed since their division, 

 except as their blood had intermingled through common descents. In 



* Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, pp. 454, 482. 



vol. vih. 54 



