MOTHER-AGE CIVILISATION 95 



peasant festivals, in children's jingles and dances, and 

 to a lesser extent in the records of historians of other 

 and more advanced nations, in primitive law, and in 

 saint-legends and hero-sagas. Written history or even 

 pseudo-history, which for the sociologist is often more 

 valuable belongs to a comparatively late period of 

 development, indeed to a type of tribal organisation 

 which is characteristic of a patriarchal civilisation. 

 We are compelled therefore to turn to fossils, if we 

 wish to reconstruct the social habits of any earlier 

 period. The difficulty of any such reconstruction does 

 not, however, lie in the paucity of fossils, but rather 

 in their superabundance ; above all, in the accurate 

 determination of the particular stratum of social custom 

 to which individual fossils belong. Personally, I have 

 been impressed with the mass of material, and with the 

 labour required to classify it, rather than disheartened 

 by the faint traces which some writers appear to find 

 of group-marriage and mother-age customs. 1 No legend, 

 no bit of folklore of India, Greece, Scandinavia, or 

 Germany which comes to my notice seems without 

 new meaning when examined from the standpoint of 

 an early sex-relationship, which is not that usually 

 assumed for the Aryan peoples. The great struggle for 

 sex -supremacy, the contest between patriarchal and 

 matriarchal folks, this, one of the chief factors of 

 human history, receives infinite light from the struggle 

 of patrician Kome with the Etruscan nations, and indeed 

 with the whole East, from the survival of an obscure 



1 I hope later to publish essays dealing with the fossil evidence in folklore, 

 hero-legend, primitive laws, and festivals, etc., the material for which has been 

 already collected. 



