94 KINDRED GROUP-MARRIAGE 



ence. We need not join in that despairing cry of, " We 

 know nothing, let us believe all things." 



The frame of mind summed up in " reason starved, 

 imagination drunk " is never profitable, least of all in 

 social difficulties. Therein, as in a dynamical problem, 

 an accurate knowledge of the initial conditions is 

 essential to the discovery of a solution. The present 

 essay attempts to describe some of those initial condi- 

 tions as they concern the great problem of sex. It 

 makes no attempt at solution ; it solely endeavours to 

 remove certain misconceptions with regard to the pre- 

 historic sex -relations among our Teutonic forefathers. 

 But the reader who grasps that a thousand years is but 

 a small period in the evolution of man, and yet realises 

 how diverse were morality and customs in matters of 

 sex in the period which this essay treats of, will hardly 

 approach modern social problems with the notion that 

 there is a rigid and unchangeable code of right and 

 wrong. He will mark, in the first place, a continuous 

 flux in all social institutions and moral standards ; but, 

 in the next place, if he be a real historical student, 

 he will appreciate the slowness of this steady secular 

 change ; he will perceive how almost insensible it is in 

 the lifetime of individuals, and although he may work 

 for social reforms, he will refrain from constructing 

 social Utopias. 



(2) The historian who wishes to reconstruct the 

 prehistoric social relations of any civilised race has, like 

 the naturalist, to build up the past from fossils. These 

 fossils are, in the historian's case, embedded in language, 

 in primitive customs, in folklore, in Weisthwner\ in 



