1 8 NOTES ON WEST AFRICAN CATEGORIES 



off town, where they think or know that some com- 

 passionate relation may, perchance, still live. In such 

 cases love has been outlived and there is no horror of 

 death. I said " sad existence " ; but, while it looks 

 and is sad from our point of view, it would, in those 

 far-off animal days, be a natural state of affairs and no 

 one would be sad about it. The mother, however, 

 owned the children so long as she could keep them, 

 and they in their wanderings, if they ever thought 

 about it, would never connect a father as the cause of 

 their being, but would look on and consider the 

 mother as their sole progenitor. As Hartland in his 



Primitive Paternity says : " Birth is a 



phenomenon independent of the union of sexes. By 

 this it is not meant that, at the present time, every- 

 where among such peoples physiological knowledge is 

 still in so backward a condition that the co-operation of 

 the sexes is regarded as a matter of indifference in the 

 production of children. That would be to contradict 

 the facts. To-day the vast majority of savage and 

 barbarous natives are aware that sexual union is 

 ordinarily a condition precedent to birth. Even 

 among such peoples, however, exceptions are admitted 

 without difficulty : and there are peoples like certain 

 Australian tribes who do not yet understand it. Their 

 state of ignorance was probably once the state of other 

 races, and indeed of all humanity. The history of 

 mankind so far as we can trace it, whether in written 

 records or by the less direct, but not the less certain 

 methods of scientific investigation, exhibits the slow 

 and gradual encroachments of knowledge on the 



