May 1, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



655 



tion, a method apt to be as satisfactory to those 

 with you as it is unconvincing to those against 

 you. Professor Steinmetz has pointed out 

 for all time that haphazard instances are not 

 ethnological proof. The soundness of the com- 

 parative method rests on the scrupulous raking 

 through of ethnographic data. Data assembled 

 uncritically may also be misleading. Some of 

 Professor Todd's illustrations are misleading. 

 In citing modern Mexicans (p. 42), for exam- 

 ple, he is not citing, as the text would convey, 

 a primitive people. On pp. 39 £F. he confuses 

 the grounds of divorce with the extent of it. 

 In referring to the pirravru relationship of 

 the Australian Blackfellow (p. 35) as an affair 

 of intermittent promiscuity he appears ignor- 

 ant of the fact that it is quite as stable a 

 relationship and as carefully regulated as the 

 coexistent pairing relationship. 



Fortunately in spite of this misconception 

 Professor Todd has not fallen into the old 

 promiscuity pitfall. Still he argues that in 

 view of well verified sporadic cases of group 

 marriage and of periodic license monogamy is 

 not an innate instinct. To this contention it 

 may be said that group marriage is still too 

 obscure a fact to be called upon with much 

 assurance in argument. Whether periodic sex 

 license may not be more adequately explained 

 as a phenomenon of the breaking down of 

 habit than of the persistence of an old habit is 

 certainly an open question. As for other 

 deviations from monogamy, polygyny, poly- 

 andry, and prostitution, are they not due to 

 social processes which have rendered monog- 

 amy inadequate, to considerations of social 

 prestige or dominion, to wealth or poverty, to 

 ancestor worship? More social processes are 

 involved in polygamy than in monogamy. 



In education through the family does the 

 form of marriage matter at any rate quite as 

 much as Professor Todd together with his 

 sentimental opponents would have us think? 

 Until very recently purposive education in or 

 out of the family has invariably taken the 

 form of discipline, and in the polygynous 

 patriarchal family there has ever been a 

 greater degree of discipline for offspring than 

 in any monogamous type of family. Then too 



has not even brittleness in marriage been ex- 

 aggerated as a pernicious effect upon offspring? 

 Domestic education is essentially a matter of 

 imitation, and one adult may be imitated as 

 well as another. Family discord is of course 

 pernicious, but brittleness in the marriage tie 

 is likely to preclude discord, if anything. 



But discipline is not education, I shall be 

 told, nor is imitation. True, not in the 

 modern meaning of the term education ; but is 

 that meaning to be reckoned with in consid- 

 ering any type of familial education as yet 

 known? In all kinds of primitive education 

 and in all kinds of familial education, primi- 

 tive and modern, there has been but one pur- 

 pose, the producing of conformity to type. If 

 Professor Todd had taken this thesis as a 

 basis for his arraignment of the role of the 

 family in education, not merely pointing to it 

 from time to time (pp. 146, 171), he would 

 have been on safer and, I may say, more fer- 

 tile ground. Moreover if he had stuck to the 

 proposition he himself laid down at the outset 

 that the bond between husband and wife or 

 between parent and child is a primeval tropism 

 based on the satisfactions resulting from 

 safety and pleasure contacts he would have 

 been under no necessity to show that monog- 

 amy was not an instinct, or that in view of the 

 practise of adoption there was no natural 

 bond in parenthood. Habitual association is 

 the natural bond in parenthood whether adop- 

 tive or not. It is also the natural bond in 

 marriage, whether brittle or lax. The pull of 

 habit, whether in parentage or in marriage, 

 Professor Todd together with many other stu- 

 dents has overlooked. 



Had he allowed for it, he would have escaped 

 making several false generalizations. He 

 would not have said that any sort of sex con- 

 duct was allowable among primitive men pro- 

 vided it did not infringe on the rights of 

 others (p. 35) — unless of course he included 

 among rights the right not to be discomfited 

 by innovation, a right most jealously safe- 

 guarded by primitive man. He would not have 

 argued that the family in which indefinite 

 notions of kinship existed could not have 

 exerted any great disciplinary force (p. 86). 



