96 KINDRED GROUP-MARRIAGE 



tribe of Hebrews in that same East, and from the ulti- 

 mate ejection of the more intensely matriarchal Celts 

 from Eastern and Central Europe by the Teutonic races. 

 Everywhere we have the survival of a more efficient 

 civilisation, the triumph of a society in which the male 

 was supreme, over one largely organised on a female 

 basis. 



We may fully admit the superiority of Eoman to 

 Etruscan, of Hebrew to Philistine civilisation, and yet 

 decline to draw any argument from it for the subjection 

 of woman at the present day. To draw such an argu- 

 ment would be as idle as to deduce the inferiority of 

 man from the existence of an age in which customs and 

 civilisation were chiefly the product of female ingenuity. 

 We may fully admit the dark side of that mother-age, 

 its human sacrifices, its periodic sexual license, its w r ant 

 of strong incentives to individual energy ; we may 

 recognise these things, indeed, as the sources of its 

 collapse before a more active social variation. But, at 

 the same time, we must fully acknowledge the immense 

 services which that early civilisation of woman has 

 rendered to the human race. What those services are 

 may, I think, be concisely summed up in an analogy, 

 thrown out as a mere fancy, but which yet may indicate 

 some unrecognised law of growth. 



It is a biological hypothesis, which, however whim- 

 sical, has yet been fruitful of results, that the prenatal 

 life of the individual, from the development of the ovum 

 through all the fetal changes, represents with more or 

 less exactness in microcosm the development of the 

 species in macrocosm from some very simple ancestral 



