[40] Tylor (“Primitive Culture,” i. p. 44) says, “The Semitic family, which represents one of the oldest known civilizations of the world, includes Arabs, Jews, Phœnicians (?), Syrians, &c., and may have an older as well as a newer connection in North Africa. This family takes in some rude tribes, but none which would be classed as savages. The Aryan family has existed in Asia and Europe certainly for several thousand years, and there are well known and marked traces of early barbaric condition, which has perhaps survived with least change among secluded tribes in the valleys of the Hindu Kush and Himalaya.” [Query, What is the nature of the evidence that they have survived, and have not degenerated?] Mr Tylor continues, “There seems, again, no known case of any full Aryan tribe having become savage. The gipsies and other outcasts are, no doubt, partly Aryan in blood, but their degraded condition is not savagery. In India there are tribes Aryan by language, but whose physique is rather of indigenous type, and whose ancestry is mainly from indigenous stocks, with more or less mixture of the dominant Hindu.” Compare infra, [ch. v.], and De Maistre, p. 272.
[41] Just as Hercules (vide Hercules, [p. 180]), who embodied in another line the tradition of Adam, is said by Mr Grote, “Hist. of Greece,” i. p. 128–9, “to have been the most renowned and most ubiquitous of all the semi-divine personages worshipped by the Hellenes,” so that “distinguished families are everywhere to be traced who have his patronymic, and glory in the belief that they are his descendants.” To whom would they trace back more naturally than to Adam?
[42] This must be taken in connection with what I have said, ch. x.
[43] At p. 88, Mr M’Lennan sees evidence of the “form of capture” and the fact of capture among the Jews; but he will at least allow the appeal to be made to the Scriptures, as their most authentic history. What do we find at the commencement? In the first marriage contract recorded, i.e. of Isaac and Rebecca? Why, the reverse of capture. Genesis xxvi. 8, “But if the woman will not follow thee thou shalt not be bound by the oath.” Also v. 39, 40.
Mr M’Lennan (p. 29), with reference to the hurling “stones and bamboos at the head of the devoted bridegroom in Khondistan,” says, “the hurling of old shoes after the bridegroom among ourselves may be a relic of a similar custom.” But this custom would seem to be much more directly traced to the custom among the Jews of taking the shoes from the man who refused to marry his brother’s widow (Deuteronomy), and which is more generally stated in Ruth iv. 7, as a token of cession of right—“the man put off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour, this was the testimony of a cession of right in Israel” (Ruth iv. 7).
[44] “Dr Latham would invert the order of development by producing the ruder fact—polyandry—from the less rude obligation. But clearly this is an inversion of the order of nature, which is progressive,” &c.—M’Lennan, “Prim. Marriage,” p. 206.
[45] It seems to me that Turner’s account of polyandry in Tibet, quoted by Mr M’Lennan, p. 193, gives plain evidence of the transition from the Jewish custom to the “regulated” polyandry. It is said “that the choice of a wife is the privilege of the elder brother.”
[46] “Instead of endogamy we might, after some explanations, have used the word caste. But caste connotes several ideas besides that on which we desire to fix attention. On the other hand, the rule which declares the union of persons of the same blood to be incest has been hitherto unnamed” (p. 49), and he terms it exogamy; and (p. 130) he says, “in all the modern instances in which the symbol of capture is most marked we have found that marriage within the tribe is prohibited as incest.”
[47] Mr M’Lennan (p. 148) says, “We shall endeavour to establish the following propositions:—1. That the most ancient system in which the idea of blood relationship was embodied, was the system of kinship through females only. 2. That the primitive groups were, or were assumed to be homogeneous. 3. That the system of kinship through females only, tended to render the exogamous groups heterogeneous, and thus to supersede the system of capturing wives.”
[48] “Aucune des trois chronologies bibliques, là ou elles ne s’accordent pas entre elles, ne s’impose avec une autorite suffisante soit au fidele, soit au savant. L’Eglise catholique a laissé le choix libre entre ces chronologies et elles n’oblige pas même à en adopter une.”—“Le Monde et L’Homme Primitif selon la Bible,” par Mgr. Meignan, Evêque de Chalons-sur-Marne, 1869.