244 KINDRED GROUP-MARRIAGE 



carry off the maidens and pass the night with them ; 

 this conduct is so customary also in the Archangel 

 district that a girl who finds no such temporary lovers 

 would be reproached by her parents. In the Government 

 of Stavropol this hilltop vergaderung repeats itself at 

 every wedding ; the young men and maidens, after the 

 customary wedding dance, pass the night in pairs, 

 engaged folk together, and the other young people in 

 temporary couples. A similar habit prevailed among 

 the peasantry in large districts of Germany almost up 

 to the end of the Middle Ages. 1 



Thus we see that the Aryan sex-festival, with its 

 common meal, its dance and song, which is so strikingly 

 evidenced in our study of the words for kinship and sex, 

 is no philological cobweb. It is fossilised in practices 

 which we meet everywhere in folklore, and trace in many 

 existing peasant customs. We are not dealing with local 

 perversions of the sexual instinct ; our study of the Aryan 

 words for kinship shows that they are fossils of what 

 was once a widespread phase of primitive civilisation. 

 The sexual and the social institutions of that phase of 

 human development may be wholly repellent to the 

 morality of to-day ; we may shudder at blood relation- 

 ship as the permit and not the ban to sexual intimacy. 

 But we must also remember that if exogamy promotes a 

 wider range of variation for natural selection to act 

 upon, endogamy may originally have established a 

 sufficient degree of correlation between human char- 

 acters to give mankind stability and the advantages of 

 race. Above all, those human affections, those civic 



1 See Appendix I. : On the Mailelm and Kiltgang. 



