PRIMITIVE MAN AND WOMAN 23! 



most promiscuous. But there is not a shred of 

 evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever 

 formed a general stage in the history of man- 

 kind." * The hypothesis, he adds, is without 

 foundation, and "essentially unscientific." Even 

 among some of the savage and barbarous races 

 of the present day polygamy is practically un- 

 known, or positively prohibited. 5 Morgan was 

 wrongly and very arbitrarily forming his con- 

 clusions from a limited field of observation and 

 his generalizations were without any warrant in 

 fact. 



As Robert H. Lowie, Assistant Curator of 

 Anthropology in the American Museum of 

 Natural History, shows, Morgan never advanced 

 any proof for his preposterous theory of an or- 

 iginal herd family in place of the union between 

 man and wife. It was merely a conclusion that 

 was required by his first principles of materialistic 

 evolution, that man was descended from the 

 brute, and he therefore made primitive man more 

 immoral than the brute itself, without attaching 

 any stigma to this immorality. His theory was 

 advanced, says Lowie, "precisely as some evolu- 

 tionary philosophers advance the axiom of spon- 

 taneous generation ; and thereby placed it beyond 

 the range of scientific discussion." 6 Summing 



4 "The History of Human Marriage," p. 133. 



*Ibid. r p. 547. 



'"Primitive Society," p. 57. 



