THE CANNIBAL IN EVOLUTION 159 



customs, known chiefly to us by what is seen among the 

 Australian aborigines. In order to show as clearly as 

 possible what the orthodox view seems to be, I may quote 

 Frazer {Folklore in the Old Testament). After speaking 

 of the exogamous classes of a tribe as always two, four, 

 or eight, but never an odd number, he says : " This 

 suggests, what all the evidence tends to confirm, that these 

 various groups have been produced by the deliberate 

 and repeated bisection of a community, first into two, 

 then into four, and finally into eight exogamous and 

 intermarrying groups or classes, for no one, so far as I 

 know, has yet ventured to maintain that society is subject 

 to a physical law, in virtue of which communities, like 

 crystals, tend automatically and unconsciously to in- 

 tegrate or disintegrate, along rigid mathematical lines, 

 into exactly symmetrical units. . . . The evidence points 

 to the conclusion that the dual organization or division 

 of a community into two exogamous and intermarrying 

 classes was introduced for the purpose of preventing the 

 marriage of brothers with sisters." 



Leaving aside for a moment the concluding sentence 

 of this judgment with the remark that it might just as 

 well be argued that the Table of Affinities was introduced 

 to prevent the marriage of a deceased wife's sister to her 

 brother-in-law, and noting that abstract ideas, such as 

 incest, must follow, not precede, practice grown into 

 rigid " moral " custom, it may be remarked that if the 

 inheritance of Mendelian characters follows exactly upon 

 the laws of probability, we may reasonably assume that 

 physical laws, however altered from their primal sim- 

 plicity, rule in all departments or planes of life. The 

 words " deliberate and repeated " in the above paragrapli 

 certainly call for scrutiny. As we observe that all political 



