98 KINDRED GROUP-MARRIAGE 



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>pe which 



for the philological is but one strand of the rope 

 the anthropologist twists from folklore, mythology, and 

 hero -legend. If the philologist describes for us from 

 language a state of society which receives no support 

 from these other sources of knowledge, then we are, 

 perhaps, justified in treating the present stage of his 

 science with less respect than he claims for it. Above 

 all, the time (1885) is an opportune one for a raid ; the 

 bubble of the primitive Aryan leading a pastoral life in 

 Asia has burst. We may look to Lithuania, or even to 

 Scandinavia, with as much justification as to Asia for the 

 home of the Aryan ; and it is hardly possible now to 

 assert that the existence of a root in Teutonic dialects, 

 which has no known equivalent in Sanskrit, is certainly 

 a mark of late origin. It is impossible now to argue 

 that the fundamental idea attached to such a root must 

 be of a later growth than a primitive Aryan civilisation 

 of a patriarchal type. 



Let us be quite clear as to the real issue involved, for 

 it is a crucial one. If the interpretation of the names of 

 relationship as given by the professional philologists be 

 correct, then there never was a mother-age ; or all its 

 words of relationship were completely extinguished under 

 a later patriarchal regime. It is not a question of change 

 of use, but of the fundamental ideas connected with the 

 roots of the words used for relationship. The change of 

 use would be intelligible, every word has a long use- 

 history. The extinction of every word marking such all- 

 important relations as those of sex is one that the sane 

 anthropologist will never admit ; and the sole alternative, 

 if the philologists have really described the civilisation 



