September 



1909] 



NA TURE 



by transitory chance of circumstances, there was most to 

 be learned at the moment. First, the British occupation 

 of India was the occasion, on the one hand, of tlie dis- 

 covery of Sanskrit, the creation of this science of com- 

 parative philology, and the demonstration of a new link 

 of cultural affinity over the whole realm of Aryan speech. 

 The same political event led no less directly to the dis- 

 covery of the patriarchal structure of Hindoo society, and 

 so through the comparative study of Indian, Roman, and 

 ancient Celtic and Teutonic law to an inductive verifica- 

 tion of .Aristotle's doctrine of the " naturalness " of patri- 

 archal society. This doctrine dominated political science 

 for nearly fifty years. " The effect of the evidence derived 

 from comparative jurisprudence," Sir Henry Maine could 

 write in 1861,' " is to establish that view of the primaeval 

 conditions of the human race which is known as the Patri- 

 archal Theory. There is no doubt, of course, that this 

 theory was originally based on the Scriptural theory of 

 the Hebrew patriarchs in Lower Asia. ... It is to be 

 noted, however, that the legal evidence comes nearly ex- 

 clusively from the institutions of societies belonging to the 

 Indo-European stock, the Romans, Hindoos, and 

 Sclavonians supplying the greater part of it ; and indeed 

 the difficulty, at the present stage of the inquiry, is to 

 know where to stop ; to say of what races of men it is 

 not allowable to lay down that the society in which they 

 are united was originally organised on the patriarchal 

 model." And he refers explicitly to the former controversy 

 between Filmer and Locke, to point out how the tables 

 had now been turned upon the latter. 



Thus in the half-century which intervenes between 

 Herder and Maine, the political philosophy of Europe 

 seemed to have turned almost wholly from exploration to 

 introspection ; from the Pacific to early Rome and the 

 German forests ; and from the study of survivals in the 

 modern practice of savages, to that of prima-val custom 

 betrayed by the speech and customs of the civilised world. 

 It was .Aristotle over again, with his appeal to custom, 

 ancestral belief, and canonical literature, following liard 

 upon the heels of the visionary revolutionary Plato. 

 ^iaine's own words, indeed, about Rousseau^ would be 

 applicable almost without change to the course of Greek 

 thought in the fourth century B.C. " \^'e have never seen 

 ill our own generation," he says, "indeed the world has 

 not seen more than once or twice in all the course of 

 history, a literature which has exercised such prodigious 

 influence over the minds of men, over every cast and shade 

 of intellect, as that which emanated from Rousseau 

 between 174C1 and 1762. It was the first attempt to re- 

 erect the edifice of human belief after the purely icono- 

 clastic efforts commenced by Bayle, and in part by our 

 own Locke, and consummated by Voltaire ; and besides 

 the superiority which every constructive effort will always 

 enjoy over one that is merely destructive, it possessed the 

 immense advantage of appearing amid an all but universal 

 scepticism as to the soundness of all foregone knowledge 

 in matters speculative. . . . The great difference between 

 the views is that one bitterly and broadly condemns the 

 present for its unlikeness to the ideal past, while the 

 other, assuming the present to be as necessary as the past, 

 does not affect to disregard or censure it." 



I have devoted some space to these first steps of 

 Linguistic Palaeontology and Comparative Jurisprudence 

 because the method of inquiry which they announced 

 promised at first sight to malce good a very serious defect 

 in the instruments of anthropological research. Human 

 history, outside of Europe and of one or two great 

 oriental States like China, hardly went back beyond living 

 memory ; even Mexico had no chronicles beyond the first 

 few hundred years, and the records of old-world States 

 like China, which at first sight offered something, turned 

 out on examination to have least to give'. Thev had lived 

 long, it is true, but their lives had been " childlike and 

 bland," devoid of change, and almost empty of experi- 

 ence. Consequently there was no proof that the " wild 

 men " of the world's margins and byways were really 

 primitive at all. The Churches held them children of 

 wrath, degenerate offspring of Cain ; the learned fell back 

 upon pre-.\damite fictions, to palliate, rather than to ex- 

 plain their invincible ignorance of Europe and its ways. 



^ Maine. "Ancient Law." pp. i2:-3. - Ilhi., pp. S6-g. 



NO. 2082, VOL. 81] 



Here, however, in the new light thrown by the history 

 of speech, there seemed to be a prospect of deep msight. 

 into the history of human societies. Disillusionment came 

 in due course, when doctors disagreed; but illusion need, 

 never have taken the form it did, had either the philo- 

 logists or the philosophers realised that all the really 

 valuable work was being done within the limits of a single 

 highlv special group of tongues ; that the very circumstance- 

 that this group of tongues had spread so widely, pointed 

 to some strong impulse driving the men who spoke theth. 

 into far-reaching migrations ; that one of the few points 

 upon which linguistic paleontologists were really 

 unanimous was that both the Indo-European and the 

 Semitic peoples, in their primitive condition, were purely 

 pastoral; and that this pastoral habit was itself an almost 

 ccercive cause for their uniformly patriarchal organisation. 

 The last point, however, belongs so completely to another 

 phase of our storv that it is almost an anachronism to 

 introduce it here." It serves however to indicate, once 

 again, if that be necessary, how completely the philo- 

 sopher, and even the man of science, is at the mercy of 

 events in the ordering of his search after knowledge. It 

 is, indeed, almost true to say that if the primitive Aryan 

 had not had the good fortune not merely to live on a 

 grass-land, but also to find domesticable quadrupeds there, 

 there could no more have been a science of comparative 

 philology in modern Europe than there could be among 

 the natives of vour own Great Plains or of the Pacific 

 Coast : for in lio other event would there have been any 

 such " familv of languages " to compare. 



In the absence of warning thoughts like these, how- 

 ever, the comparative philology and the comparative law 

 of the patriarchal peoples of the North-West Quadrant 

 and of India went gailv on. What Maine had done for 

 India, Maine himself, with Solm and von Maurer, in 

 Germany ; Le Plav, de Lavcleve, and d'Arbois de Joubain- 

 ville in France; W. F. Skene in far-off Scotland: Whitley 

 Stokes and others in Ireland; Rhys in Wales; and 

 Mackenzie Wallace and Kovalevsky in Russia, had done 

 for the early institutions of their respective countries : all 

 emphasising' alike the wide prevalence of the same commori 

 type of social structure, based upon the same central 

 institution, the Patriarchal Family, with the Vatyia 

 Fotesias of its eldest male member as its overpowering 

 bond of union ; and Maine's own words do not the least 

 exaggerate the beliefs and expectations which were evoked 

 by t"his new aspect of the Study of Man. 



The Malriarclwte in Southern India, Ajvica, and 

 North America. 



The Patriarchal Theory lasted barely fifty years. It 

 had owed its revival, as we have seen, to two fresh 

 branches of research, comparative jurisprudence and com- 

 parative philologv, both stimulated directly by the results 

 of European administration in Northern India. It owed 

 its decline to the results of similar inquiries in other parts 

 of the world, stimulated no less directly by other phases 

 of the great colonising movement, which marks, above all 

 other things, the century from 1760 to 1S60. Here again 

 a small number of examples stand out as the crucial 

 instances. British administration in India had, of course, 

 been extended over the non-Arvan south, as well as over 

 the north ; and in Travancore, and other parts of the 

 Madras Presidency, British commissioners found them- 

 selves confronted with types of society which showed the 

 profoundest disregard of the Patriarchal Theory. Like the- 

 Lvcians of Herodotus, these perverse people ' called them- 

 selves after their mothers' names " : they honoured their 

 mother and neglected their father, in society, and govern- 

 ment as well as in their homes; their administration, their 

 law, 'and their whole mode of life rested on the assump- 

 tion that it was the women, not the men, in whom reposed 

 the continuitv of the family and the authority to govern 

 the State. Here was a parecbasis. a " perverted type 

 of society worthv of Aristotle himself. It is a type which, 

 as a matter of fact, is widely distributed in Southern and 

 South-eastern Asia, and had been repeatedly described bv 

 travellers from the davs of Tavernier (in Borneo! and 

 Laval (in the Maldive Islands'), if not earlier still. It 

 existed also in the New World, and Lafitau had already 

 compared the Iroquois with the ancient Lycians. But it 

 was Buchanan's account of the Nairs of the Malabar 



