not only made the discovery of the evils of interbreeding, but acted on it with promptitude and self-denial.  Thirdly:  Mr. Morgan seems to require, for the enforcement of the exogamous law, a contrat social.  The larger communities meet, and divide themselves into smaller groups, within which wedlock is forbidden.  This ‘social pact’ is like a return to the ideas of Rousseau.  Fourthly:  The hypothesis credits early men with knowledge and discrimination of near degrees of kin, which they might well possess if they lived in patriarchal families.  But it represents that they did not act on their knowledge.  Instead of prohibiting marriage between parents and children, cousins, nephews and aunts, uncles and nieces, they prohibited marriage within the limit of the name of the kin.  This is still the Hindoo rule, and, if the Romans really might not at one time marry within the gens, it was the Roman rule.  Now observe, this rule fails to effect the very purpose for which ex hypothesi it was instituted.  Where the family name goes by the male side, marriages between cousins are permitted, as in India and China.  These are the very marriages which some theorists now denounce as pernicious.  But, if the family name goes by the female side, marriages between half-brothers and half-sisters are permitted, as in ancient Athens and among the Hebrews of Abraham’s time.  Once more, the exogamous prohibition excludes, in China, America, Africa, Australia, persons who are in no way akin (according to our ideas) from intermarriage.  Thus Mr. Doolittle writes:  {256} ’Males and females of the same surname will never intermarry in China.  Cousins who have not the same ancestral surname may intermarry.  Though the ancestors of persons of the same surname have not known each other for thousands of years, they may not intermarry.’  The Hindoo gotra rule produces the same effects.

For all these reasons, and because of the improbability of the physiological discovery, and of the moral ‘reform’ which enforced it; and again, because the law is not of the sort which people acquainted with near degrees of kinship would make; and once more, because the law fails to effect its presumed purpose, while it does attain ends at which it does not aim—­we cannot accept Mr. Morgan’s suggestion as to the origin of exogamy.  Mr. M’Lennan did not live to publish a subtle theory of the origin of exogamy, which he had elaborated.  In ’Studies in Ancient History,’ he hazarded a conjecture based on female infanticide:—­

’We believe the restrictions on marriage to be connected with the practice in early times of female infanticide, which, rendering women scarce, led at once to polyandry within the tribe, and the capturing of women from without. . . .  Hence the cruel custom which, leaving the primitive human hordes with very few young women of their own, occasionally with none, and in any case seriously disturbing the balance of the sexes within the