102 KINDRED GROUP-MARRIAGE 



d'ava, either as a man or a sacrificer, appears in no 

 recognisable Teutonic form ; while, according to the evi- 

 dence of Eoman historians, not only the seers, but the 

 sacrificers among the early Teutons were women. 1 It 

 is clear, I think, that the above interpretations, which 

 might easily be largely multiplied, have been invented 

 with the patriarchate in view, and are not solely the 

 outcome of purely philological investigations. 



In addition to the above words I might cite a whole 

 series like veddjan, wed, a widely - spread root in 

 Scandinavian dialects, denoting to yoke, or bind, and 

 so to marry ; Ehe, a legal or binding contract, and so a 

 marriage ; kaufen, to buy, i.e. to buy a wife, and so to 

 marry. These and many other such words undoubtedly 

 do point to a patriarchal regime, but they are of very 

 late origin, and we can almost mark their first use as 

 words of sex. 



Nothing to my mind is more suggestive of the danger 

 of specialism in anthropology than such a philological 

 scheme as may be found in the concluding pages of 

 Deecke's book. A complete patriarchal family system 

 is worked out for the primitive Aryans on the basis of 

 such interpretation of the terms of relationship as those 

 I have just indicated. We find an elaborate code of 

 duties for parents and children, for uncles, aunts, and 

 brothers-in-law, developed from the supposed roots of 

 their names. Did space permit me to quote the whole 

 of it, my readers would, I think, wonder with me how 

 complex society had grown, and how multifarious 



1 It is worth noting that there is much anthropological evidence to show that 

 most early sacrifices were made by women and not by men. 



