[127] Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 475. Cf. ibid. p. 52.
[128] Cf. Haberland, loc. cit. p. 56 sqq.
[129] Hubrig, quoted by Ploss, Das Kind, ii. 263.
Thus various considerations have led men to destroy their own offspring. Under certain circumstances the advantages, real or imaginary, assumed to result from the deed have been sufficiently great to silence the voice of parental love, which, as will be seen, is to be found even in the bosom of a savage father. The resistance offered by this instinct would be so much the less as the child is killed immediately after its birth, at a period of its life when the father’s affection for it is as yet only dawning Even where, at first, infanticide was an exception, practised by a few members of the tribe, any interference from the side of the community may have been prevented by the notion that a person possesses proprietary rights over his offspring; and, once become habitual, infanticide easily grew into a regular custom. In cases where it was found useful to the tribe, it would be enforced as a public duty; and even where there no longer was any need for it, owing to changed conditions of life, the force of habit might still keep the old custom alive.
Though infanticide is thus regarded as allowable, or even obligatory, among many of the lower races, we must not suppose that they universally look upon it in this light. Mr. McLennan grossly exaggerated its prevalence when he asserted that female infanticide is “common among savages everywhere.”[130] Among a great number of them it is said to be unheard of or almost so,[131] and to these belong peoples of so low a type as the Andaman Islanders,[132] the Botocudos,[133] and certain Californian tribes.[134] The Veddahs of Ceylon have never been known to practise it.[135] Among the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, Mr. Bridges informs me, it occurred only occasionally, and then it was almost always the deed of the mother, who acted from “jealousy, or hatred of her husband, or because of desertion and wretchedness.”[136] Mr. Fison, who has lived for a long time among uncivilised races, thinks it will be found that infanticide is far less common among the lower savages than it is among the more advanced tribes.[137] Considering further that the custom of infanticide, being opposed to the instinct of parental love, presupposes a certain amount of reasoning or forethought, it seems probable that, where it occurs, it is not a survival of earliest savagery, but has grown up under specific conditions in later stages of development.[138] It is, for instance, very generally asserted that certain Indians in California never committed infanticide before the arrival of the whites;[139] and Ellis thinks there is every reason to suppose that this custom was practised less extensively by the Polynesians during the early periods of their history than it was afterwards.[140]
[130] McLennan, Studies in Ancient History, p. 75.
[131] See Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 312 sq.; and, besides the authorities there referred to, Dorsey, ‘Omaha Sociology,’ in Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn. iii. 369; Kirke, Twenty-five Years in British Guiana, p. 160; Chalmers, Pioneering in New Guinea, p. 163; Hodgson, Miscellaneous Essays, p. 123 (Bódo and Dhimáls); Baumann, Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle, p. 161 (Masai).
[132] Man, in Jour. Anthr. Inst. xii. 329.
[133] Wied-Neuwied, op. cit. ii. 39. Keane, in Jour. Anthr. Inst. xiii. 206.
[134] Powers, op. cit. pp. 192, 271, 382.