152 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



When a hypothesis is immediately verifiable, and dis- 

 covery is anticipated by others, there is little or no 

 compensation. If Adams had been forestalled by Lever- 

 rier in the discovery of Uranus by long months or 

 years, and the planet had actually been found for the 

 more fortunate mathematician, the sense of disap- 

 pointment must have been acute. But in my own case 

 no such verification was at hand, and I was quite aware 

 from the attitude of those who advised me, and my own 

 knowledge of theory, that Atkinson's views were thought 

 of little value. Naturally they did not seem so to me, 

 for while he had deduced his theory from the facts of the 

 social phenomenon, known as " avoidance," of which 

 the last remnants are to be found tabulated in the 

 ecclesiastical Table of Affinities, I had come to the same 

 conclusion by a deduction from opposed and anta- 

 gonistic phenomena, the existence of which his views 

 helped to explain. For if he drew his premisses from 

 savage life and " avoidance," I drew my own from 

 certain facts observed by myself, and even now observ- 

 able by all, in modern society whether in England 

 or elsewhere, facts not of avoidance, but of a peculiar form 

 of jealousy, which seemed to me an obvious survival of 

 ancient instinct. 



It is a truth, known to almost all wives and to women 

 generally, whether they have observed it in their own 

 husbands and fathers, or in those of others, that some- 

 thing more than an over-exigent desire to ensure their 

 female children being comfortably and suitably settled, 

 prevents many men from welcoming suitors for their 

 daughters. And I may say here that the deductions 

 I draw from this are probably seldom known to the 

 fathers themselves. To act instinctively without the 



