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CHAPTER X. 



SOME REMAKKABLE CUSTOMS. 



It has long been an accepted doctrine that among the similar 

 customs found prevaiUng in distant countries^ there are some 

 which are evidence of worth to the ethnologist. But in deal- 

 ing with these things he has to answer, time after time, a new 

 form of the hard question that stands in his way in so many- 

 departments of his work. He must have derived from observa- 

 tion of many cases a general notion of what Man does and 

 does not do, before he can say of any particular custom which 

 he finds in two distant places, either that it is likely that a 

 similar state of things may have produced it more than once, 

 or that it is unlikely — that it is even so unlikely as to approach 

 the limit of impossibility, that such a thing should have grown 

 up independently in the two, or three, or twenty places where 

 he finds it. In the first case it is worth little or nothing to 

 him as evidence bearing on the early history of mankind, but 

 in the latter it goes with more or less force to prove that the 

 people who possess it are allied by blood, or have been in con- 

 tact, or have been influenced indirectly one from the other or 

 both from a common source, or that some combination of these 

 things has happened ; in a word, that there has been historical 

 connexion between them. 



I give some selected cases of the Argument from Similar 

 Customs, both where it seems sound and where it seems un- 

 sound, before proceeding to the main object of this chapter, 

 which is to select and bring into view, from the enormous mass 



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