March 25, 1875] 



NATURE 



403 



by Sir John Lubbock, could have been generated in 

 the circumstances, and of evidence, so far as we know, 

 there is not a trace. Sir John Lubbock's theory of the 

 origin of monandric marriage, exogamy, and the form of 

 capture, also seems open to observation. He ascribes 

 monandric marriage to the appropriation, in tribes with- 

 out any marriage law, of captured women by indi- 

 vidual captors ; supposing that a captured woman, as 

 she did not belong to the tribe, would be readily left 

 with the man who took her ; that envy of the superior 

 felicity attained by captors would lead to a frequency of 

 capture, until, at length, the possession of a captured 

 woman became the ambition and hope of every man of a 

 tribe ; and that, there being no other way than capture 

 of getting a wife of one's own, the custom of exogamy was 

 in fact established, becoming a defined tribal law as 

 capture, and therewith monandric marriage, became 

 frequent, and thereafter surviving, as such customs do 

 survive, when wives were got by purchase or exchange, 

 with the capture symbolised. Among savages, however, 

 women are no unconsidered trifles ; and the proposition 

 that, when captured, they would be freely left to their 

 captors is so far from being self-evident that it might 

 reasonably be deemed improbable, and certainly requires 

 an amount of support which Sir J. Lubbock has failed to 

 give it. But apart from this, it is, we are disposed to think, 

 fatal to Sir J. Lubbock's hypothesis, that it overlooks the 

 fact that captures of women are usually made hy parties, not 

 by single persons, and that it is a conflict between /«;•//« 

 which, as a rule, is symbolised in the form of capture. In as- 

 cribing to the prevalence of the capture of wives the curious 

 custom which forbids a father-in-law and mother-in-law 

 to speak to their son-in-law — indignation at the capture 

 being presumed to be the foundation of this rule of non- 

 intercourse — Sir John, we venture to think, has certainly 

 been hasty. At the time when the capture was real and 

 the indignation of the father-in-law and mother-in-law 

 real, their new relative would not have been much in the 

 way of meeting them. He, with his wife, would have been 

 in another tribe than theirs, and that a hostile tribe. 

 Moreover, the same custom prevents a woman from 

 speaking to her father-in-law, and operates, if we mistake 

 not, in other cases also ; and these Sir John's suggestion 

 would not explain. 



Our criticism shall extend to only one point more, and 

 that is, the explanation offered by Sir John Lubbock of the 

 origin of Totem worship. We notice it the more readily 

 because, in this edition, he puts it forward with some ap- 

 pearance of hesitation. He thinks that the worship of 

 animals may have arisen out of a practice of " naming first 

 individuals, and then their families," after particular animals. 

 " A family which was called after the bear would look on 

 that animal first with interest, then with respect, and at 

 length with a sort of awe." But does not this sound as if Sir 

 J. Lubbock believed that the world began with the patri- 

 archal family system.' With it the transmission of a 

 name through an individual, first to a family and then to 

 a tribe, would offer no difficulty. It is necessary, however, 

 to explain the worship of animals in tribes which acknow- 

 ledge kinship through females only ; in tribes in which 

 children take the tribal name, not of their father but of 

 their mother ; and in which the family, still in an extremely 

 undeveloped state, was probably altogether unknown at 



the distant time when animal worship arose. In such tribes 

 a man's personal name dies with him. Though he has his 

 " medicine," it goes to no successor. It is the women, who, 

 by the way, are without the " medicine," who transmit the 

 totem. That names given to individuals, especially if the 

 individuals were men, should diffuse themselves through 

 tribes of this kind, and this in the case of an endless 

 number of such tribes, appears altogether impossible. 

 This, however, after all, only means that we cannot see 

 how the thing can have happened ; and, on the other 

 hand, if Sir John Lubbock should find that in his theoris- 

 ing he has overlooked some of the most perplexing of the 

 facts to be accounted for, he need not greatly grieve. 

 He is entitled to reflect that, allowing for all shortcom- 

 ings, his book has a sterling value and_has done a most 

 useful work. 



KIN A HAN'S " VALLEYS, F/SSUJ^ES, FRAC- 

 TURES, AND FAULTS" 

 Valleys, and their Relation to Fissures, Fractures, and 



Faults. By G. H. Kinahan, M.R.I.A., F.R.G.S.I. 



(London : Triibner and Co.) 



WHENEVER anew explanation of natural pheno- 

 mena is offered to the public, its advocates, 

 assuming that due importance will be still assigned to the 

 forces to which formerly all had been attributed, frequently 

 seem to ignore them altogether, and therefore other 

 inquirers are generally found who take up the defence of 

 the old view, though they often admit practically as much 

 as is required by the new theory. Mr. Kinahan thinks that 

 sub-aerialists, in explaining the present configuration of 

 the country, have been in the habit of attaching too great 

 importance to surface wear and tear, and of ignoring the 

 effect of fractures produced by earth movements. 



Any contribution of facts, well observed and clearly 

 recorded and reasoned upon, is of value, whether or not 

 wc accept the deductions of the author. We are, however, 

 unable to satisfy ourselves from the perusal of the work 

 before us that the facts would have appeared to us as they 

 appeared to the author — the references to localities where 

 the evidence for faults and other phenomena may be seen 

 are too vague, and the inferences seem very doubtful. 



There are few who would not be prepared to agree 

 with the statement '' that the present valleys are not 

 solely due to rain and rivers, but rather to that action 

 combined with glacial and marine denudation, and that 

 all were generally led by the breaks and faults in the 

 rocks" (p. 181), if it means that we must not refer all 

 valleys to rain and rivers exclusively, that denudation of 

 any kind is apt to be directed by the greater or less 

 resisting power of the material to be denuded, and that 

 fractured work is more easily acted upon and denuded 

 than solid work. 



What we really have to do is to inquire in each special 

 case which of the various agents have had most to do with 

 the formation of the particular valley, lake, or other earth 

 feature before us ; and therefore, in discussing the relation 

 between faults and valleys, we require something more 

 definite than a reference to places, where, as the author 

 says (p. 102), " some of what are here considered faults 

 might possibly only be Silurian cliffs, at the base 

 of which the Old Red Sandstone and limestones were 



