i 3 o PHYSICAL BASIS OF CIVILIZATION 



tive communities and which they maintained must 

 have widowed many of the adult females and 

 orphaned even larger numbers of the young. The 

 position of widows and orphans in such communities 

 must have been pitifully desperate. Relief could 

 only come from a disposition of the females to attach 

 to themselves any available adult males, nolens 

 volens, or from the sympathetic interest of the more 

 fortunate in the community. Not much could be 

 expected from the last named agency. The family 

 could therefore not be the normal unit of such com- 

 munities. 



After tribes and clans, etc., had existed for many 

 generations, and had gradually attained a high 

 degree of organization and of internal security, then 

 governmental, conventional, and ethical ideas may 

 have resuscitated the family group, practically de 

 novo. For even the memory of their primitive 

 existence may have been obliterated. 



The existence of a fundamental difference should 

 be noted, however, between the attractions which 

 hold the family united and the external coercive 

 forces which bring and keep the members of tribes, 

 clans, etc., together. These latter may be likened 

 to compression. 



Love, affection, and mutual interdependence are 

 the intrinsic factors which, by attractions akin to 

 those which draw the ultimate particles of a sub- 

 stance to each other, through desire voluntarily 

 unite the members of a family group. 



