[171] Grey might have made a valuable contribution to the comparative psychology of passion by noting down the chant of the rivals in their own words.  Instead of that, for literary effect, he cast them into European metre and rhyme, with various expressions, like “bless” and “caress,” which of course are utterly beyond an Australian’s mental horizon.  This absurd procedure, which has made so many documents of travellers valueless for scientific purposes, is like filling an ethnological museum with pictures of Australians, Africans, etc., all clothed in swallow-tail coats and silk hats. Cf.  Grosse (B.A., 236), and Semon (224).  Real Australian “poems” are like the following: 

     “The peas the white man eats—­
     I wish I had some,
     I wish I had some.”

Or this: 

     “The kangaroo ran very fast
     But I ran faster;
     The kangaroo was fat;
     I ate him.”

[172] Roy.  Geogr.  Soc. of Australasia, Vol.  V., 29.

[173] The reason why Westermarck is so eager to prove liberty of choice on the part of Australian women is because he has set himself the hopeless task of proving that the lower we go the more liberty woman has, and that “under more primitive conditions she was even more free in that respect than she is now amongst most of the lower races.”  “As man in the earliest times,” he asserts (222), “had no reason ... to retain his full-grown daughter, she might go away and marry at her pleasure.”  Quite the contrary; an Australian, than whom we know no more “primitive” man, had every reason for not allowing her to go away and marry whom she pleased.  He looked on his daughter, as we have seen, chiefly as a desirable piece of property to exchange for some other man’s daughter or sister.

[174] As distinguished from the more common sham elopement, at which the parents are consulted as usual.  In the Kunandaburi tribe, for instance, as Howitt himself tells us (Jour.  Anthr.  Inst., XX., 60-61) the suitor asks permission of the girl’s parents to take her away.  “She resists all she can, biting and screaming, while the other women look on laughing.”  The whole thing is obviously a custom ordered by the parents, and tells us nothing regarding the presence or absence of choice.  See the remarks on sham capture in my chapter on Coyness (125).

[175] The reader will note that here are some additional objects usually supposed to be “ornamental,” but which, as in all the cases examined in the chapter on Personal Beauty, are seen on close examination to serve other than esthetic purposes.  These are intended to charm the women, not, however, as things of beauty, but by their magic qualities and by attracting their attention.

[176] With his usual conscientious regard for facts Westermarck declares (70) that in a savage condition of life “every full-grown man marries as soon as possible.”