“By the side of the aged Mico Tomo-chi-chi, as, thin and weak, he lies upon his blanket, hourly expecting the summons of the pale-king, we see the sorrowing form of his old wife, Scenauki, bending over and fanning him with a bunch of feathers.”

In his work on the Indians of California (271), Powers writes: 

“An aged Achomauri lost his wife, to whom he had been married probably half a century, and he tarred his face in mourning for her as though he were a woman—­an act totally unprecedented, and regarded by the Indians as evincing an extraordinary affection.”

St. John relates the following incident in his book on Borneo: 

“Ijan, a Balau chief, was bathing with his wife in the Lingga River, a place notorious for man-eating alligators, when Indra Lela, passing in a boat, remarked, ’I have just seen a very large animal swimming up the stream.’  Upon hearing this, Ijan told his wife to go up the steps and he would follow.  She got safely up, but he, stopping to wash his feet, was seized by the alligator, dragged into the middle of the stream, and disappeared from view.  His wife, hearing a cry, turned round, and seeing her husband’s fate, sprang into the river, shrieking ‘Take me also,’ and dived down at the spot where she had seen the alligator sink with his prey.  No persuasion could induce her to come out of the water; she swam about, diving in all the places most dreaded from being a resort of ferocious reptiles, seeking to die with her husband; at last her friends came down and forcibly removed her to their house.”

These stories certainly imply conjugal attachment, but is there any indication in them of affection?  The Cherokee squaw mourns the impending death of her husband, which is a selfish feeling.  The Californian, similarly, laments the loss of his spouse.  The only thing he does is to “tar his face in mourning,” and even this is regarded by the other Indians as “extraordinary” and “unprecedented.”  As for the woman in the third story, it is to be noted that her act is one of selfish despair, not of self-sacrifice for her husband’s sake.  We shall see in later chapters that women of her grade abandon themselves to suicidal impulses, not only where there is occasion for real distress, but often on the most trivial pretexts.  A few days later, in all probability, that same woman would have been ready to marry another man.  There is no evidence of altruistic action—­action for another’s benefit—­in any of these incidents, and altruism is the only test of genuine affection as distinguished from mere liking, attachment, and fondness, which, as was explained in the chapter on Affection, are the products of selfishness, more or less disguised.  If this distinction had been borne in mind a vast amount of confusion could have been avoided in works of exploration and the anthropological treatises based on them.  Westermarck, for instance,