2 6o PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



the Bedouins, and among various autochthonous 

 peoples of North and South America, the rite is or has 

 been within recent times in use. 1 Nor has it ceased to 

 be practised in Europe by the Gipsies and the 

 Southern Slavs. In the French department of Aube, 

 when a child bleeds he puts a little of his blood on the 

 face or hands of one of his playfellows and says to him : 

 "Thou shalt be my cousin." In like manner in New 

 England, when a school-girl not many years since 

 pricked her finger so that the blood came, one of her 

 companions would say: " Oh ! let me suck the blood ; 

 then we shall be friends." Something more than 

 vestiges of the rite remain among the Italians of the 

 Abruzzi. And the band of the Mala Vita, a society for 

 criminal purposes in Southern Italy only broken up a 

 few years ago, was a brotherhood formed by the blood- 

 covenant. Indeed many secret societies both civilised 

 and uncivilised have adopted an initiation-rite of which 

 the blood-covenant forms part, either actually or by 

 symbol representing an act once literally performed. 



That the blood-covenant, whereby blood-brother- 

 hood is assumed, is not a primeval rite is obvious from 

 its artificial character. At the same time its barbarism 

 and the wide area over which it is spread point 

 with certainty to its early evolution, and the fact 

 that it is in unison with conceptions essentially and 

 universally human. It has its basis in ideas which 

 must have been pre-existent. Even among races like 

 the Polynesians, and the Turanian inhabitants of 



1 So far as I am aware it is expressly recorded only of the 

 Seminoles in North America (Featherman, Aoneo-Mar, 172), a 

 tribe in Yucatan and a tribe in Brazil (Trumbull, 54, 55. citing 

 authorities) ; but practices in other tribes point to the underlying 

 idea. 



