December 17, 1886.] 



SCIENCE. 



569 



wiU destroy the deadly principles of venom with- 

 out inducing a similar destruction of vital compo- 

 nents in the circulating fluid. The outlook, then, 

 for an antidote for venom which may be available 

 after the absorption of the poison, lies clearly in 

 the direction of a physiological antagonist, or, in 

 other words, of a substance which will oppose the 

 actions of venom upon the most vulnerable parts 

 of the system. The activities of venoms are, 

 however, manifested in such diverse ways, and so 

 profoundly and rapidly, that it does not seem prob- 

 able that vve shall ever discover an agent which 

 will be capable at the same time of acting effi- 

 ciently in counter-acting all the terrible energies of 

 these poisons. The monograph closes with a 

 complete bibliography of the subject, and a num- 

 ber of colored lithographs, which serve to illus- 

 trate in a most perfect manner the lesions caused 

 by the venoms. 



MCLENNAN'S STUDIES IN ANCIENT 

 HISTORY. 



The first edition of McLennan's • Primitive 

 marriage ' was published in 1866. The novelty 

 and striking character of the theories propounded 

 in it, the accumulation of interesting facts, and the 

 clear and at^tractive style, aroused attention, and 

 led to much discussion. Many writers of note — 

 Sir Henry Maine, Sir John Lubbock, Mr. L. H. 

 Morgan, Professor Bachofen — took part in the 

 controversy. Darwin himself entered the arena. 

 Ten years later, to meet a pressing demand, the 

 ^work was reprinted by the author, with additions, 

 under the title of 'Studies in ancient history.' 

 That the interest awakened in the subject has 

 remained unabated is evident from the fact, that, 

 since the author's lamented death, his brother has 

 found it necessary to issue a new edition of this 

 volume, with some notes of his own, designed to 

 clear up doubtful points, and to indicate certain 

 changes of view which the author had announced. 

 The publication wUl be welcome to all who take 

 an interest in the study of the primitive history 

 of our race, and who have not had an opportunity 

 of procuring the earlier editions. Few works on 

 the subject can be read with greater satisfaction, 

 even by- those who do not yield assent to the 

 author's views. The grace of diction, the pro- 

 found scholarship, and the stimulating originality 

 of thought, displayed in the work, combine to 

 make it one of the classics of modern science. 



Twenty years, however, have not sufficed to 

 establish the views put forth with so much confi- 



Studies in ancient history, comprising a reprint of 

 Primitive marriage. New ed. By the late John Ferguson 

 McLennan. London and New York, Macmillan, 1886. 8". 



dence, and maintained with so much ingenious 

 reasoning. On the contrary, antagonistic theories 

 have sprung up on every side. To some extent, 

 indeed, the author, as his brother intimates, had 

 changed his views ; and it is not easy to determine 

 what were the precise conclusions at which he had 

 arrived on some important points. The view, for 

 example, which represents the earliest tribes of 

 men as living in a state of ' communal marriage,' 

 or, in other words, of promiscuous intercourse, is 

 maintained throughout his first publication. This 

 view was subsequently adopted by Lubbock in his 

 ' Origin of civilization,' and by Morgan in his 

 ' Ancient society.' But it was contested with 

 overwhelming power of argument by Darwin, in 

 his ' Descent of man.' He showed that the near- 

 est congeners of man, the anthropoid apes, are all 

 pairing animals, and, like other pairing animals, 

 fiercely jealous. That human beings, on their 

 first appearance, should at once have sunk in the 

 social scale below the apes, and even below the 

 sparrows, and should only have emerged from this 

 condition of more than brutal debasement by a 

 long succession of struggles and experiences, is of 

 all suppositions the most improbable. 



This consideration seems to have impressed Mr. 

 McLennan, and to have produced a remarkable 

 change of opinion. One of his essays, added in 

 this volume to the original treatise, comprises a 

 severe and destructive criticism of Sir John Lub- 

 bock's scheme, which makes ' communal mar- 

 riage ' the starting-point of human society. With 

 equal force of logic, the author disposes of Mor- 

 gan's ' classificatory system' and Bachofen's 

 ' mother-right,' both of which are founded on the 

 same fanciful basis, thus demolished by him. 

 Yet, strangely enough, he fails to see that his 

 own theory of ' marriage by capture ' rests on the 

 same unsafe foundation, and must fall with the 

 others. His view, as presented in his earliest 

 publication, and not subsequently retracted, is 

 that in the first stage of tribal society ' utter pro- 

 miscuity ' prevailed ; that with this was connected 

 the practice of female infanticide, the male chil- 

 dren being preserved to add to the strength of the 

 tribe, while females were regarded as a source of 

 weakness ; that the scarcity of females in a tribe 

 led to the custom of capturing them from other 

 tribes, and this custom finally became the law of 

 the tribe. Thus marriage arose, at first exoga- 

 mous (that is, restricted to women of other tribes 

 or kindreds), and afterwards, as society advanced, 

 either endogamous (that is, restricted to the clan) 

 or general, as in civilized nations. As the author 

 himself, in his later essays, has taken away the 

 main substructure on which his ingenious theory 

 was built, it is not necessary to refer at any length 



