WHAT IS MARRIAGE 1 11 



comers. A sense of ownership in wives, as in cattle, 

 weapons, or other goods, would thus arise, and it would 

 become necessary to stamp them with the seal of 

 possession. Hence the adoption of a marriage cere- 

 mony of some sort, however rude. Purchase probably 

 followed upon capture. Lubbock has invented the 

 term " communal marriage " to express the order of 

 things under which a woman is supposed to belong 

 to her tribe and not to any individual, but the dis- 

 tinction between this and promiscuous intercourse is 

 rather fanciful. The idea of communal rights may 

 help to explain the Babylonish and Balearic customs 

 above referred to. It may also have been at the 

 bottom of a strange Peruvian notion that a husband 

 was disgraced if his wife on her marriage day proved 

 to be a virgin. MacLennan opines that marriage by 

 capture in the form of exogamy, or the practice of 

 one tribe raiding another and carrying off its women, 

 was due to a scarcity of females. But later writers 

 disagree with him upon this point. Lubbock believes 

 that the system of capture was originally adopted 

 by chiefs and others as a means of obtaining exclusive 

 possession of a wife — as a form of marriage, in fact, 

 which did not interfere with communal rights. Herbert 

 Spencer thinks that the possession of foreign wives 



