NATURE 



133 



THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1876 



McLENNAN'S STUDIES IN ANCIENT 

 HISTORY 



Studies in Ancient History, Comprising a Reprint of Primi- 

 tive Marriage. By John Ferguson McLennan, M.A., 

 LL.D., Advocate. (London : Ouaritch, 1876.) 



I^HE learned and ingenious author of " Primitive 

 Marriage" has in this volume republished that 

 excellent work, appending to it his paper on " Kinship in 

 Ancient Greece," which originally appeared in the Fort- 

 nightly Review, and some essays, in which he discusses 

 Bachofen's " Das Mutterrecht," Morgan's work on Re- 

 lationships, Sir Henry Maine's views on the constitution 

 of the Ancient Irish Family, and the chapter on Marriage 

 in my " Origin of Civilisation." 



Bachofen supposes that in the first stage of the develop- 

 ment of the family marriage was unknown ; and his theory 

 is that at length the women, being by nature nobler and 

 more sensitive than the men, and impelled moreover 

 by strong religious aspirations, combined to put an end to 

 this system, and to introduce marriage. For this an appeal 

 to force became necessary and was successful. The result 

 of the victory, moreover, was that the women claimed and 

 established a superiority over the men ; they were the 

 heads of the family ; after them the children were named ; 

 through them the rights of succession were traced, and 

 they even exercised a political as well as a domestic 

 -supremacy. At length, however, men reasserted their 

 original supremacy ; they reconquered the first place in 

 the family and the state, established their right to the 

 inheritance of property, and to confer their names upon 

 their children. Mr. McLennan considers that Bachofen's 

 *' methods and results are equally unscientific ; " he points 

 out that the system of inheritance through females is 

 really no evidence of female superiority, but arises partly 

 from marriage not being monogamous, or such as per- 

 mitted the certainty of fatherhood, and partly also, he 

 considers, from the fact of women not yet living in their 

 husbands' houses. At the same time he fully concedes to 

 Bachofen the honour of being the first to point out that 

 a system of kinship through mothers only had generally 

 preceded that through the male line. 



Nor is Mr. McLennan more disposed to accept the 

 theory of Mr. Morgan, which indeed he characterises as a 

 " wild dream, not to say nightmare, of early institutions." 

 Mr. McLennan supposes that in Mr. Morgan's opinion his 

 tribal organisation was an institution intentionally de- 

 signed to prevent the intermarriage of near relations. In 

 support of this he quotes the passage in which Mr. Mor- 

 gan says : "It is to be inferred that the tribal organisa- 

 tion was designed to work out a reformation with respect 

 to the intermarriage of brothers and sisters." 



From this and other passages a previous writer in this 

 journal, and I myself, had supposed that Mr. Morgan 

 regarded the steps in his system of development as arbi- 

 trary .^nd intentional. 



Nor do I even now see how we could have arrived at 

 any other conclusion. Mr. Morgan has, however, ex- 

 plained that this is not his theory, and I am not therefore 

 sure whether either Mr. McLennan or I thoroughly under- 



stand his view. The solution which he has given, how- 

 ever, of the origin of the family in Mr. McLennan's 

 opinion — " failing to explain the phenomena must sink 

 below the level of reasonable guessing, to which level 

 indeed it must have sunk even had it explained the 

 phenomena, if by any other set of mere conjectures the 

 phenomena could be equally well explained." 



Mr. McLennan himself considers that the earliest form of 

 marriage (if indeed it can be so called) was that still pre- 

 valent amongst the Nairs of Malabar, in which one wife 

 was married to several husbands not necessarily related 

 to one another. Under this system the idea of relation- 

 ship naturally took the form of kinship through females. 

 Family property went ultimately to the daughters of their 

 sisters ; a man's heirs being in the first place his brothers) 

 and subsequently his sister's children. From the Nair sys- 

 tem was, in Mr. McLennan's opinion, gradually developed 

 (in many cases through an intermediate form anciently pre- 

 valent in Britain) the Thibetan species of polyandry in 

 which the sons of a house took one wife between them* 

 This change eventually introduced kinship through males. 

 It involved the breaking up of the primitive form of the 

 family, and led in time to the transference of the govern- 

 ment from the mother to the father. After this the prac- 

 tice of monandry arose, the younger brothers making 

 separate marriages, and thus Thibetan polyandry died 

 out, leaving behind it the Levirate, that is to say, the 

 obligation of brothers to marry in turn the widow of a 

 brother deceased, a custom which the Old Testament has 

 rendered familiar to us. The Levirate next died out, and 

 thus the family slowly assumed the form to which we are 

 accustomed. It will thus be seen that the keystone of 

 Mr. McLennan's system is the practice of polyandry, 

 which, indeed, under his theory is a necessary stage of 

 the development of the family relationship. I cannot, 

 however, regard polyandry as having been a general and 

 necessary stage in human development. I have therefore 

 suggested that individual marriage rose out of capture. 

 That just as a warrior converted to his own use the 

 animals which he captured, and made slaves of the men, so 

 he made a wife of any woman whom he admired, the cap- 

 ture giving him a right which the other men of the tribe 

 did not share. This view, indeed, seems so natural that I 

 wonder it had not been before suggested ; and I observe 

 that one or two recent writers have treated it as a 

 recognised and well-known fact, whereas it cannot 

 at present claim to be more than an individual theory 

 which none of the authorities on such a question, such as 

 Mr. Darwin, and Mr. McLennan himself, have as 

 yet accepted. Mr. McLennan, indeed, denies that my 

 views are " in the least degree probable," and if such a 

 question could be decided by authority, I should at once 

 bow to his decision. Such, however, is not the case, and 

 I will only say that, before my work was published, I 

 had foreseen and weighed as carefully as I was able, 

 the objections which Mr. McLennan has now brought 

 forward ; and that I then thought, and still think, that 

 I have satisfactorily replied to them. The fundamental 

 objection which Mr. McLennan urges I did not indeed 

 expect him to allege. Like Bachofen, I commence with 

 a time when marriage did not exist. Mr. McLennan, 

 however, replies : — " Sir John Lubbock has not only 

 failed to show that the initial stage of his scheme ever 



