Totemism and 

 Exogamy. Vol. 



EXOGAMY IN CHINA 133 



thought of marriage with one of the same blood as 

 one's own, is the impelling motive of exogamy? 



Sir J. G. Frazer at the last pages of his Totemism 

 and Exogamy says of the aborigines of Australia, in 

 whose social system most writers believe is to be found 

 the last extant relic of the earliest traceable state of 

 human society : — 



"What idea these primitive sages and lawgivers, if Frazer, 

 we may call them so, had in their minds when they 

 laid down the fundamental lines of the institution, we Fv^pprfM-s'.' 

 cannot say with certainty ; all that we know of savages 

 leads us to suppose that it must have been what we 

 should now call a superstition, some crude notion of 

 natural causation which to us might seem transparently 

 false, though to them it doubtless seemed obviously true. 

 Yet egregiously wrong as they were in theory, they appear 

 to have been fundamentally right in practice. What they 

 abhorred was really evil ; what they preferred was really 

 good." 



Frazer 's last stated opinion on exogamy is that it 

 was "artificial and that it was deliberately devised for 

 the purpose which it actually serves, namely the pre- 

 vention of the marriage of near kin." 



The Exogamy of the Chinese race does not appear, 

 upon examination, to be due to a conscious reforma- 

 tion; and the evil consequences of a breach of the 

 practice of exogamy ''the proper way in marriage," 

 were apprehended, even in historical times, in a form 

 which precludes and which must, by untold ages, have 

 antedated any conscious reformatory movement. 



That Chinese Exogamy was upheld as an institu- 

 tion through a fear of the consequences, including a 

 fear of those very evils which the leading Authorities 

 on the subject think unlikely or impossible to have been 

 contemplated or known to primitive man, is, I think, 

 shown by references in the Chinese classics. 



In the Tso Chuen there is, in the commentary on Legge, C.C., 

 the record of the twenty-fifth year of Duke Seang, the 

 story of Ts'ang Woo-tsze and his insistence on marry- 

 ing a widow who by birth belonged to the same parent 

 family as himself. The brother of the widow objected 

 and said "husband and wife should be of different 

 surnames." After further objection founded on an in- 

 suspicious answer to enquiries by augury in the matter, 

 Tsing Woo-tsze finally said ' ' She is a widow : — what does 

 all this matter. Her former husband bore the brunt of 

 it." So he married her and through her he suffered 

 shame. Her former husband had not been of the 

 same surname : and here we have a defiance by a 



Vol. V. Pt. III. 

 p. 514. 



