284 SOME EEMARKABLE CUSTOMS. 



which the record of kindred is kept up. In any full discus- 

 sion, other points would have to be considered, such as the 

 wish to bind different tribes together in friendship by inter- 

 marriage, and the opinion that a wife is a slave to be stolen 

 from the stranger, not taken from a man's own people. There 

 is a good deal in this last consideration, as we may see by the 

 practice of the Spartan marriage, in which, though the bride's 

 guardians had really sanctioned the union, the pretence of 

 carrying her off by force was kept up as a time-honoured cere- 

 mony. The Spartan marriage is no isolated custom, it is to be 

 found among the Circassians,^ and in South America.^ Wil- 

 liams says that on the large islands of the Fiji group, the 

 custom is often found of seizing upon a woman by apparent or 

 actual force, in order to make her a wife. If she does not ap- 

 prove the proceeding, she runs off when she reaches the man's 

 house, but if she is satisfied, she stays.^ In these cases the 

 abduction is a mere pretence, but it is kept up seemingly as a 

 relic of a ruder time when, as among the modern Australians, 

 it was done by no means as a matter of form, but in grim 

 earnest. 



Lastly, restrictions from marriage are occasionally found 

 applied to cases where the relationship is more or less imagi- 

 nary, as in ancient Rome, where adoption had in some measure 

 the effect of consanguinity in barring marriage ; or among the 

 Moslems, where relation to a foster-family operates more fully 

 in the same way ; or in the Roman Church, where sponsorship 

 creates a restriction from marriage, even among the co-spon- 

 sors, which it requires a dispensation to remove. Again, two 

 members of a Circassian brotherhood, though no relationship 

 is to be traced between them, may not marry,* and even among 

 the savage Tupinambas of Brazil, two men who adopted one 

 another as brothers were prohibited from marrying each other's 

 sisters and daughters.^ But such practices as these may rea- 

 sonably be set down as mere consequences of the transfer 

 both of the rights and the obligations of consanguinity to 



' Klemm, C. Q., vol. iv. p. 26. ^ Wallace, p. 497. See Perty, p. 270. 

 ' WiUiams, vol. i. p. 174. * Elemm, C. G., vol. iv. p. 24. 



° Southey, vol. i. p. 250. 



