Footnote 57: No time should be lost in gathering and recording every scrap of this folk-lore that can be found. The American Folk-Lore Society, founded chiefly through the exertions of my friend Mr. W. W. Newell, and organized January 4, 1888, is already doing excellent work and promises to become a valuable aid, within its field, to the work of the Bureau of Ethnology. Of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, published for the society by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., nine numbers have appeared, and the reader will find them full of valuable information. One may also profitably consult Knortz's Märchen und Sagen der nordamerikanischen Indianer, Jena, 1871; Brinton's Myths of the New World, N. Y., 1868, and his American Hero-Myths, Phila., 1882; Leland's Algonquin Legends of New England, Boston, 1884; Mrs. Emerson's Indian Myths, Boston, 1884. Some brief reflections and criticisms of much value, in relation to aboriginal American folk-lore, may be found in Curtin's Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, pp. 12-27.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 58: Until lately our acquaintance with human history was derived almost exclusively from literary memorials, among which the Bible, the Homeric poems, and the Vedas, carried us back about as far as literature could take us. It was natural, therefore, to suppose that the society of the times of Abraham or Agamemnon was "primitive," and the wisest scholars reasoned upon such an assumption. With vision thus restricted to civilized man and his ideas and works, people felt free to speculate about uncivilized races (generally grouped together indiscriminately as "savages") according to any à priori whim that might happen to captivate their fancy. But the discoveries of the last half-century have opened such stupendous vistas of the past that the age of Abraham seems but as yesterday. The state of society described in the book of Genesis had five entire ethnical periods, and the greater part of a sixth, behind it; and its institutions were, comparatively speaking, modern.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 59: McLennan's Studies in Ancient History, comprising a reprint of Primitive Marriage, etc. London, 1876, p. 421.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 60: There is much that is unsound in it, however, as is often inevitably the case with books that strike boldly into a new field of inquiry.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 61: A general view of the subject may be obtained from the following works: Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1871, and Die Sage von Tanaquil, Heidelberg, 1870; McLennan's Studies in Ancient History, London, 1876, and The Patriarchal Theory, London, 1884; Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. xvii.), Washington, 1871, and Ancient Society, New York, 1877; Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, Cambridge, Eng., 1885; Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, 5th ed., London, 1889; Giraud-Teulon, La Mère chez certains peuples de l'antiquité, Paris, 1867, and Les Origines de la Famille, Geneva, 1874; Starcke (of Copenhagen), The Primitive Family, London, 1889. Some criticisms upon McLennan and Morgan may be found in Maine's later works, Early History of Institutions, London, 1875, and Early Law and Custom, London, 1883. By far the ablest critical survey of the whole field is that in Spencer's Principles of Sociology, vol. i. pp. 621-797.[Back to Main Text]
Ἀλλ' ἄγε μοι τόδε εἰπὲ καὶ ἀτρεκέως κατάλεξον,
εἰ δὴ ἐξ αὐτοῖο τόσος παῖς εἶς Ὀδυσῆος.
αἰνῶς γὰρ κεφαλήν τε καὶ ὄμματα καλὰ ἔοικας
κείνῳ, ἐπεὶ θαμὰ τοῖον ἐμισγόμεθ' ἀλλήλοισιν,
πρίν γε τὸν ἐς Τροίην ἀναβήμεναι, ἔνθα περ ἄλλοι
Ἀργείων οἱ ἄριστοι ἔβαν κοίλῃς ἐπὶ νηυσίν·
ἐκ τοῦ δ' οὔτ' Ὀδυσῆα ἐγὼν ἴδον οὔτ' ἐμὲ κεῖνος.
Τὴν δ' αὖ Τηλέμαχος πεπνυμένος ἀντίον ηὔδα
τοιγὰρ ἐγώ τοι, ξεῖνε, μάλ' ἀτρεκέως ἀγορεύσω.
μήτηρ μέν τ' ἐμέ φησι τοῦ ἔμμεναι, αὐτὰρ ἔγωγε
οὐκ οἶδ'· οὐ γάρ πώ τις ἑὸν γόνον αὐτὸς ἀνέγνω.
Odyssey, i. 206.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 63: Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, p. 213; Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, p. 107; Morgan, Ancient Society, part iii., chap. iii. "After battle it frequently happens among the native tribes of Australia that the wives of the conquered, of their own free-will, go over to the victors; reminding us of the lioness which, quietly watching the fight between two lions, goes off with the conqueror." Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 632.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 64: The notion of the descent of the human race from a single "pair," or of different races from different "pairs," is a curious instance of transferring modern institutions into times primeval. Of course the idea is absurd. When the elder Agassiz so emphatically declared that "pines have originated in forests, heaths in heaths, grasses in prairies, bees in hives, herrings in shoals, buffaloes in herds, men in nations" (Essay on Classification, London, 1859, p. 58), he made, indeed, a mistake of the same sort, so far as concerns the origin of Man, for the nation is a still more modern institution than the family; but in the other items of his statement he was right, and as regards the human race he was thinking in the right direction when he placed multitude instead of duality at the beginning. If instead of that extremely complex and highly organized multitude called "nation" (in the plural), he had started with the extremely simple and almost unorganized multitude called "horde" (in the singular), the statement for Man would have been correct. Such views were hardly within the reach of science thirty years ago.[Back to Main Text]