cites on page 357 a number of authors who asserted that sexual affection, or even the appearance of it, was unknown to the Hovas of Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and Winnabah natives, the Kabyles, the Beni-Amer, the Chittagong Hill Tribes, the Ponape islanders, the Eskimo, the Kutchin, the Iroquois, and North American Indians in general; while on the next pages he cites approvingly authors who fancied they had discovered sexual affection among tribes some of whom (Australians, Andamanese, Bushmans) are far below the peoples just mentioned.  The cause of this discrepancy lies not in these races themselves, but in the inaccurate use of words, and the different standards of the writers, some accepting the rubbing of noses or other sexual caresses as evidence of “affection,” while others take any acts indicating fondness, attachment, or a suicidal impulse as signs of it.  In a recent work by Tyrrell (165), I find it stated that the Eskimo marriage is “purely a love union;” and in reading on I discover that the author’s idea of a “love union” is the absence of a marriage ceremony!  Yet I have no doubt that Tyrrell will be cited hereafter as evidence that love unions are common among the Eskimos.  So, again, when Lumholtz writes (213) that an Australian woman

     “may happen to change husbands many times in her life, but
     sometimes, despite the fact that her consent is not asked,
     she gets the one she loves—­for a black woman can love too”

—­we are left entirely in the dark as to what kind of “love” is meant—­sensual or sentimental, liking, attachment, fondness, or real affection.  Surely it is time to put an end to such confusion, at least in scientific treatises, and to acquire in psychological discussions the precision which we always employ in describing the simplest weeds or insects.

Morgan, the great authority on the Iroquois—­the most intelligent of North American Indians—­lived long enough among them to realize vaguely that there must be a difference between sexual attachment before and after marriage, and that the latter is an earlier phenomenon in human evolution.  After declaring that among the Indians “marriage was not founded on the affections ... but was regulated exclusively as a matter of physical necessity,” he goes on to say: 

“Affection after marriage would naturally spring up between the parties from association, from habit, and from mutual dependence; but of that marvellous passion which originates in a higher development of the passions of the human heart, and is founded upon a cultivation of the affections between the sexes, they were entirely ignorant.  In their temperaments they were below this passion in its simplest forms.”

He is no doubt right in declaring that the Indians before marriage were “in their temperaments” below affectionate love “in its simplest forms”; but, that being so, it is difficult to see how they could have acquired real affection after marriage.  As a matter of fact we know that they treated their wives with a selfishness which is entirely incompatible with true affection.  The Rev. Peter Jones, moreover, an Indian himself, tells us in his book on the Ojibwas: