To understand the binding force of oaths among savages it is necessary

to observe how closely connected they are with savage ideas of fetichism

and their belief in witchcraft as a really active natural force. The

hair or food of a man, which a savage burns to rid himself of an enemy,

is no mere symbol of that enemy so much as in some sense that enemy

himself. The physical act of touching the thing invoked has reference to

feelings of casual connection between things, as in Samoa, where a man,

to attest his veracity, would touch his eyes, to indicate a wish that

blindness might strike him if he lied, or would dig a hole in the ground,

to indicate a wish that he might be buried in the event of falsehood.

In Kamschatka, if a thief remained undetected, the elders would summon

all the ostrog together, young and old, and, forming a circle round the

fire, cause certain incantations to be employed. After the incantations

the sinews of the back and feet of a wild sheep were thrown into the fire

with magical words, and the wish expressed that the hands and feet of the

culprit might grow crooked; there being apparently a connection assumed

between the action of the fire on the animal’s sinews and on the limbs

of the man. And in Sweden there are still cunning men who can deprive a

real thief of his eye, by cutting a human figure on the bark of a tree

and driving nails and arrows into the representative feature. But perhaps

the best illustration of this feeling is the practice of the Ostiaks,

who offer their wives, if they suspect them of infidelity, a handful

of bear’s hairs, believing that, if they touch them and are guilty,

they will be bitten by a bear within the space of three days. It would

seem that oaths appeal to the same idea of vicarious or representative

influence, a real but invisible connection being imagined between the

actual thing touched and the calamity invoked in touching it.

Instances from the oaths of other tribes will manifest the operation of

the same feeling as that which makes grass a symbol of utter ruin in

Samoa, or some bear’s hairs of a bear’s bite among the Ostiaks.

North Asiatic tribes have in use three kinds of oaths, the first and

least solemn one being for the accused to face the sun with a knife,

pretending to fight against it, and to cry aloud, ‘If I am guilty,

may the sun cause sickness to rage in my body like this knife!’ The

second form of oath is to cry aloud from the tops of certain mountains,

invoking death, loss of children and cattle, or bad luck in hunting,

in the case of guilt being real. But the most solemn oath of all is to

exclaim, in drinking some of the blood of a dog, killed expressly by

the elders and burnt or thrown away, ‘If I die, may I perish, decay,

or burn away like this dog.’[242] Very similar is the oath in Sumatra,

where, a beast having been slain, the swearer says, ‘If I break my

oath, may I be slaughtered as this beast, and swallowed as this heart

I now consume.’[243] The most solemn oath of the Bedouins, that of the

cross-lines, is also characterised by the same belief which appears in

the case of the slain beast affecting with sympathetic decay anyone

guilty of perjury. If a Bedouin cannot convict a man he suspects of theft

it is usual for him to take the suspected before a sheikh or kady, and

there to call upon him to swear any oath he may demand. If the defendant

agrees, he is led to a certain distance from the camp, ‘because the

magical nature of the oath might prove pernicious to the general body

of Arabs were it to take place in their vicinity.’ Then the plaintiff

draws with his sekin, or crooked knife, a large circle in the sand with

many cross-lines inside it, places his right foot inside it, causes the

defendant to do the same, and makes him say after himself, ‘By God,

and in God, and through God, I swear I did not take the thing, nor is

it in my possession.’ To make the oath still more solemn, the accused

often puts also in the circle an ant and a bit of camel’s skin, the one

expressive of a hope that he may never be destitute of camel’s milk,

the other of a hope that he may never lack the winter substance of an

ant.[244]

Firm, however, as is the savage belief that the consequences of perjury

are death or disease, a belief which shows itself not unfrequently in

actually inferring the fact of perjury from the fact of death, escape

from the obligation of an oath is not unknown among savages. On the

Guinea Coast recourse was had to the common expedient of priestly

absolution, so that when a man took a draught-oath, imprecating death

on himself if he failed in his promise, the priests were sometimes

compelled to take an oath too, to the effect that they would not employ

their absolving powers to release him. In Abyssinia a simpler process

seems to be in vogue; for the king, on one occasion having sworn by a

cross, thus addressed his servants: ‘You see the oath I have taken; I

scrape it clean away from my tongue that made it.’ Thereupon he scraped

his tongue and spat away his oath, thus validly releasing himself from

it.[245]

It does not appear that savages refine on their motives for punishment,

the sum of their political philosophy in this respect being rather to

inflict penalties that accord with their ideas of retribution deserved

for each case or crime, than to deter other criminals by warning

examples. The statement that New Zealanders beat thieves to death, and

then hung them on a cross on the top of a hill, as a warning example,

conflicts with another account which says that thieves were punished

by banishment.[246] But, subject to the influence of collateral

circumstances, savage penal laws appear to be as fixed, regular,

and well-known, as inflexibly bound by precedent, as often improved

by the intelligence of individual chiefs, as penal laws are in more

advanced societies. The case of an Ashantee king, who, limiting the

number of lives to be sacrificed at his mother’s funeral, resisted all

importunities and appeals to precedent for a greater number, is not

without parallel in reforms of law. Thus we may read of one Caffre chief

who abolished in his tribe the fine payable for the crime of approaching

a chief’s krall with the head covered by a blanket; whilst another chief

made the homicide of a man taken in adultery a capital offence, thus

transferring the punishment for the crime from the individual to the

tribe.[247]

In legal customs analogous to those of the savage or rather

semi-civilized world, the legal institutions of civilized countries,

their methods of procedure, of extorting truth, of punishing crimes, seem

to have their root and explanation. For this reason the same interest

attaches to the legal institutions of modern savages as attaches to the

laws of the ancient Germanic tribes or to the ordinances of Menu, the

interest, that is, of descent or relationship. The oath, for instance,

of our law courts presupposes in the past, if not in the present,

precisely the same state of thought as the oath customary in Samoa; and

the same virtue inherent in touching and kissing the Bible in England,

or the cross in Russia, leads the Tunguse Lapp to touch and then kiss

the cannon, gun, or sword, by which he swears allegiance to the Russian

crown.[248] The Highlander of olden time, kissing his dirk, to invoke

death by it if he lied, is a similar instance of the survival of the

primitive conception, that physical contact with a thing creates a

spiritual dependence upon it. The ordeal, so lately the judicial test of

witchcraft, still retains a foothold of faith among our country people,

as is proved by the fact that not longer ago than 1863 an octogenarian

died in consequence of having been ‘swum’ as a wizard at Little

Hedingham, in Essex. And, lastly, the English law that no person could

inherit an estate from anyone convicted of treason, or from a suicide,

shows how naturally the savage law of collective responsibility, in

reality so unjust, may survive into times of civilisation, whilst the

ignominy still attached to the blood-relations of a criminal shows with

what difficulty the feeling is eradicated.

VII.

_EARLY WEDDING CUSTOMS._

Amid the wonderful uniformity which pervades the thoughts and customs of

the world some strange reversals here and there occur, as where white

is the colour significative of grief, or where to turn one’s back on

a person is a sign of reverence. But perhaps few such reversals are

more curious than the custom of the Garos, in India, who consider any

infringement of the rule that all proposals of marriage must come from

the female side as an insult to the _mahári_ to which the lady belongs,

only to be atoned for by liberal donations of beer and pigs from the

man’s _mahári_ to that of the ‘proposee.’ More curious, however, than

even this is their marriage ceremony; at which, after the bride has been

bathed in the nearest stream, the wedding party proceed to the house of

the bridegroom, ‘_who pretends to be unwilling and runs away, but is

caught_ and subjected to a similar ablution, and _then taken, in spite of

the resistance and counterfeited grief and lamentations of his parents,

to the bride’s house_.’[249]

An exactly analogous custom as regards the bride’s behaviour at her

wedding is sufficiently well known; and if it has been correctly

interpreted as the survival, in form and symbol, of a system of capturing

wives from a neighbouring tribe, there must have been a time when among

the Garos a husband could only have been obtained in a similar way. The

improbability of this suggests the possibility of some other explanation

underlying the reluctance, feigned or real, with which it is common in

savage life for a girl to enter upon the paths of matrimony, and for the

show of resistance with which her friends oppose her departure with her

husband.

In many instances this peculiar feature of primitive life appears as

simply the outcome of feelings and affections which are the same,

howsoever different in expression, in savage as in civilised lands. The

conviction that there is an utter absence of anything like love between

children and their parents, or between men and women, in the ruder social

communities, is so strong and has been so often dwelt upon, that in

speculations on this subject there is a tendency and danger of altogether

overlooking the influence of natural affection in the formation of

customs. It is needful, therefore, to preface the present chapter with a

brief reference to the express statements of missionaries and travellers;

for if it can be shown that there is such a thing as affection between

parents and children, the inference is fair that neither would parents

part with their children nor children leave their parents without mutual

regret, when the children are married.

Of the Fijians, so famous for their cannibalism and their parenticide,

it is declared to be ‘truly touching to see how parents are attached to

their children and children to their parents.’[250] Among the Tongans,

who would sacrifice their children cruelly for the recovery of the sick,

children were ‘taken the utmost care of.’[251] The New Zealanders were

not guiltless of infanticide, yet ‘some of them, and especially the

fathers, seemed fond of their children.’[252] The Papuans of New Guinea

manifested ‘respect for the aged, love for their children, and fidelity

to their wives.’[253] In Africa, Mungo Park says of the Mandingoes: ‘The

maternal affection is everywhere conspicuous among them, and creates

a corresponding return of tenderness in the child.’[254] Among the

Eastern Ethiopians were women who lived a wild life in the woods; yet

the testimony is the same: ‘However barbarous these people be by nature,

they yet are not devoid of feeling for their children; these they rear

with nicest care, and for their provision strive to amass what property

they can.’[255] Yoruba ‘children are much beloved by both parents.’[256]

Love for their children unites the greater number of the Bushmen for

their whole lives.[257] In North America the Thlinkeet Indians ‘treat

their wives and children with much affection and kindness.’[258] Among

the Greenlanders, says Cranz, ‘the bonds of filial and parental love

seem stronger than amongst any other nations.’ Their fondness for

their children is great; parents seldom let them out of their sight,

and mothers often throw themselves in the water to save a child from

drowning. In return ingratitude towards their aged parents is ‘scarcely

ever exemplified among them.’[259] Of the natives of Australia, Sir G.

Grey says that they ‘are always ardently attached to their children,’ and

similar testimony has been borne to the parental affection even of the

Tasmanians.[260]

But, lest it should be thought that these evidences are drawn from

the higher savagery, let appeal be made to the case of savages who

confessedly belong to the lowest known types of mankind, the Andaman

Islanders, the Veddahs, and the Fuejians.

In reference to the first it is said that ‘the parents are fond of their

children, and the affection is reciprocal.’[261] The Veddahs are not only

‘kind and constant to their wives,’ but ‘fond of their children;’[262]

whilst Mr. Parker Snow saw among the Fuejians ‘many instances of warm

love and affection for their children;’[263] so that if in the sequel

we find daughters at their marriage displaying a real or simulated

repugnance to their fate, the fact need not appear to us of such extreme

mystery as it otherwise might, nor as one in which natural affection can

play no part.

A recent Italian writer on the primitive domestic state says that ‘la

passione viva d’amore che suole attribuirsi ai popoli primitivi ... é

una pura illusione.’[264] But happily for the primitive populations,

their lot is far from being really thus unbrightened by love, though

with them, as with the rest of the world, it is a frequent cause of wars

and quarrels, interfering especially with the savage custom of infant

betrothal, and leading to elopements in defeat of parental contracts.

It is peculiar to neither sex. A Tahitian girl, love-stricken, but not

encouraged, led her friends, by her threats of suicide, to persuade the

object of her affections to make her his wife.[265] The Tongans had a

pretty legend of a young chief, who, having fallen in love with a maiden

already betrothed to a superior, saved her, when she was condemned to be

killed with the other relations of a rebel, by hiding her in a cavern he

had found, whence they finally effected their joint escape to Fiji.[266]

New Zealand mythology abounds in love-tales. There is the tale of Hinemoa

and Tutanekai, which begins with stolen glances, and ends in a nocturnal

swim on the part of Hinemoa to the island, whither the music of her

lover guided her. There is the tale also of Takaranji and Raumahora—of

Takaranji, who, though besieging her father in his fortress, consented

to present both of them with water in their distress. ‘And Takaranji

gazed eagerly at the young girl, and she too looked eagerly at Takaranji

... and as the warriors of the army of Takaranji looked on, lo, he had

climbed up and was sitting at the young maiden’s side; and they said

among themselves, “O comrades, our lord Takaranji loves war, but one

would think he likes Raumahora almost as well.’”[267]

Nor would it be fair to argue, because in most savage tribes the hard

work of life devolves upon the women, that therefore there is an

entire absence of affection in savage households, whether polygamous

or otherwise, during their continuance. It is scarcely a hundred years

ago that in Caithness ‘the hard work was chiefly done, and the burdens

borne, by the women; and if a cottier lost a horse, it was not unusual

for him to marry a wife as the cheapest substitute.’[268] The Fuejians,

whose condition Captain Weddell felt compelled to describe as that of

the lowest of mankind, and whose women did all the work, gathering the

shellfish, managing the canoes, and building the wigwams, are said to

have shown ‘a good deal of affection for their wives,’ and care for their

offspring.[269] Among the Fijians, who made their women carry all the

heavy loads and do all the field-work, and who remonstrated with the

Tongans for their more humane treatment of them, not only have widows

been known to kill themselves if their relatives refused to do the duty

which custom laid upon them—namely, of killing them at their husbands’

burial—but ‘even widowers, in the depth of their grief, have frequently

terminated their existence when deprived of a dearly beloved wife.’[270]

In India, Abor husbands treated their wives with a consideration that

appeared ‘singular in so rude a race.’[271] In America the lot of a

woman was generally one of hardship; yet, says Schoolcraft, ‘the gentler

affections have a much more extensive and powerful exercise among the

Indians than is generally believed.’[272] Carib husbands are said to

have had much love for their wives, like as it was to a straw fire,

except with respect to the first wife they married.[273] Of the Thlinkeet

Indians, characterised by great cruelty to prisoners and other marks of

much barbarity, it is said that ‘there are few savage nations in which

the women have greater influence or command greater respect.’[274] ‘It

is one of the fine traits,’ says Schweinfurth of the cannibal Niam-Niam,

‘that they display an affection for their wives which is unparalleled

among natives of so low a grade ... a husband will spare no sacrifice to

redeem an imprisoned wife.’[275] Though against this evidence there is

much of a darker character to be set, the above instances will suffice

to demonstrate the real existence, the real operation, among some of

the rudest representatives of our species, of ordinary feelings of love

and affection. As in geology so in ethnology it holds true, that the

action of known existing causes is sufficient to account for much that is

obscure in the past and for all that is strange in the present.

Having so far cleared the ground as to be justified in postulating the

existence of ordinary feelings of affection between parents and children,

and between men and women, as _veræ causæ_, or real forces, even in

the lowest known savage life, let us pass to the inference that at no

time are those feelings more likely to be called into play than at a

time when the daughter of a family is about to leave her parents, and

perhaps her clan, to live henceforth with a man whom she may not even

know, or knows only to dislike.[276] In China, where on the wedding-day

the bride is locked up in a sedan-chair, and the key and chair consigned

to the bridegroom, who may not see her before that day, a traveller

once witnessed a separation between the bride and her family. ‘All the

family appeared much affected, particularly the women, who sobbed aloud;

the father shed tears, and the daughter _was with difficulty torn from

the embraces of her parents_ and placed in the sedan-chair.’[277] It

seems more likely in this case that the reluctance and resistance were

real, than that they were merely the symbols, conventionally observed,

of a system of wife-capture. But in many instances it is impossible

to distinguish a real from a feigned grief. A witness of the marriage

ceremonies among the Tartars, who describes the bride and her girl

friends as raising piteous lamentations beforehand, says that the poor

girl either was or appeared to be a most unwilling victim.[278]

Jenkinson, one of the earliest English travellers in Russia, noticed the

same custom there, but thought it affectation. On the day of marriage

the bride would in nowise consent to leave the house to go to church,

but would resist, strive, and weep, only suffering herself to be led

there by force, with her face covered, to hide her simulated grief, and

making a great noise, as though she were sobbing and weeping, all the way

to the scene of her wedding.[279] But a modern French writer ascribes

some reality to the custom, mentioning that traditional songs are still

sung in which the young bride addresses words of regret and sorrow to

her parents in the midst of her preparations for the nuptial feast.[280]

Before this last ceremony she is accustomed to go the round of her

village, with a woman who calls for the sympathy of her hearers for the

young girl whose carefree existence is about to be exchanged for the

troubles and anxieties of married life.[281]

Yet, if in China and Russia, much more among uncivilized tribes, would

the life in prospect for a bride, unless perchance her wishes coincided

with her parents’ interest, cause her to leave the home of her youth with

something more than those ‘light regrets’ which cause tears to commingle

with smiles even in England. Greenland girls, says Cranz, do nothing

till they are fourteen but sing, dance, and romp about; but a life of

slavery is in store for them as soon as they are fit for it; ‘while

they remain with their parents they are well off, but from twenty years

of age till death their life is one series of anxieties, wretchedness,

and toil.’[282] Marriage is a fate they would not seek, but cannot

avoid. Should they, however, not oppose it, they must enter upon it with

reluctance, not with alacrity.

It is worth noticing the reason Cranz gives for this reluctance, because,

in so far as modern savages may be taken to represent primitive life,

it proves the existence, in that condition, of notions, howsoever they

may have arisen, which are exactly analogous to those we connote by

the word ‘modesty.’ When the two old women, commissioned to negotiate

with a girl’s parents on behalf of a young man, first give a hint of

their purpose by praise of him and of his family, ‘the damsel directly

falls into the greatest apparent consternation and runs out of doors,

tearing her bunch of hair; for _single women always affect the utmost

bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should

lose their reputation for modesty_, though their destined husbands

be previously well assured of their acquiescence.’[283] Not, indeed,

that the reluctance is always feigned, for sometimes the name of her

proposed husband causes her to swoon, to elope to a desert place, or to

effectually free herself from further addresses, by cutting off her hair

in token of grief. Should, however, her parents consent to the match,

the usual course is for the old women to go in search of her, ‘and _drag

her forcibly into the suitor’s house_, where she sits for several days

quite disconsolate, with dishevelled hair, and refuses nourishment. When

friendly exhortations are unavailing she is compelled by force, and even

blows, to receive her husband.’

In Greenland, then, as in China, the form of capture resolves itself

either into a most unequivocal reluctance to leave home or to a

reluctance so to do feigned from feelings of bashfulness. Nor about this

bashfulness does it appear that Cranz was in error, for Egede agrees

substantially with him, telling how the bridegroom, when he has obtained

her parents’ and relations’ consent, sends some old women _to carry away

the bride by force_; ‘for though she ever so much approves of the match,

yet _out of modesty she must make as if it went against the grain, and

as if she were much ruffled at it; else she will be blamed and get an

ill name_.’ When brought to his hut, therefore, she sits in a corner

with dishevelled hair, ‘covering her face, being bashful and ashamed.’

For ‘_a new-married woman is ashamed of having changed her condition

for a married state_;’[284] and this feeling occurs again plainly in

South-Eastern Russia, where, on the eve of marriage, the bride goes round

the village, throwing herself on her knees before the head of each house

and _begging his pardon_.[285]

This last statement of Egede is most important, since it proves the

existence of feelings which seem really to contain the keynote of the

symbol of capture, however slight the reasons for suspecting their

presence in particular cases. The sentiment prevalent in Greenland has

also been noticed among the Tartars, for an authentic witness writes,

‘that if one tells a Tartar girl that it is said she is about to be

married, she runs immediately out of the room and will never speak to a

stranger on that subject.’[286] It has been justly observed that it is

unlikely feminine delicacy should diminish with civilization. But the

principle _impuris omnia impura_ will meet the difficulty. The Aleutian

Islander, says a Russian writer, ‘knows nothing of what civilized nations

call modesty. He has his own ideas of what is modest and proper, while

we should consider them foolish.’[287] For, addicted though he is to the

worst vices of the Northern nations, he will yet blush to address his

wife or ask her for anything in the presence of strangers, and will be

bashful if he be caught doing anything unusual, as, for instance, buying

or selling directly for himself without the agency of an intermediary.

Characteristic as it is of savages to express all the feelings they share

with us with an energy intensified a hundredfold, as is shown abundantly

in our different manner of grieving for the dead, it is not surprising

if we find their feelings of the kind in question display themselves

in extraordinary and often ludicrous rules of social intercourse. The

same rule, that an Aleutian husband and wife might not be seen speaking

together, led Kolbe to think that no such thing as affection existed

among the Hottentots. But this was simply for the same reason that

prohibited the Hottentot wife from ever setting foot in her husband’s

apartment in the hut, or the latter from ever entering hers except by

stealth.[288] Among the Yorubas a woman betrothed by her parents is so

far a wife that prematrimonial unfaithfulness is accounted adultery;

‘yet conventional modesty forbids her to speak to her husband, or even

to see him, if it can be avoided.’[289] A minority of the Afghan tribes

are careful to keep up a similar reserve between the time of betrothal

and marriage, so that, as among the warlike Eusofyzes, no man can see

his wife till the completion of the marriage ceremony.[290] Among the

Mongols not only may bride and bridegroom not see each other within

the same period, but the bride is not allowed to see his parents.[291]

In Russia it was once a disgrace for a young man to propose directly

to a lady, and between the day of settling the dowry with her parents

and the day of marriage he was strictly forbidden the house of his

betrothed.[292] But many tribes continue such reserve even after

marriage. A Circassian bridegroom must not see his wife or live with

her without the greatest mystery: ‘this reserve continues during life.

A Circassian will sometimes permit a stranger to see his wife, but he

must not accompany him.’[293] In parts of Fiji which are still unmodified

by Christian teaching it is ‘quite contrary to ideas of delicacy that a

man ever remains under the same roof with his wife or wives at night.’

If they wish to meet, they must appoint a secret rendezvous.[294] And a

similar law of social decorum prevails, or prevailed, among the Spartans,

Lycians, Turcomans, and some tribes of America,[295] though the processes

of thought which led to such customs lie lost, perhaps hopelessly, behind

the darkness of a thousand ages.

The custom, again, of deserting a husband and returning home for a longer

or shorter period, as found among the Votyaks of Russia and the Mezeyne

Arabs, may possibly be traced to feelings of the same description, for we

read that among the Hos, ‘after remaining with her husband for three days

only, it is _the correct thing for the wife to run away_ from him and

tell all her friends that she loves him not, and will see him no more;’

it is also _correct_ for the husband to manifest great anxiety for his

loss, and diligently to seek his wife, and ‘when he finds her _he carries

her off by main force_.’[296] This second show of resistance, customary

also among the Votyaks, seems difficult to explain as a traditional

symbol of a system of capture.

It is possible that in similar primitive ideas originated the curious

restrictions on the intercourse between a man and his mother-in-law,

or between a woman and her father-in-law. On the theory that these are

remnants of the real anger shown by parents when capture was real, it

is not easy to account for the fact that in Fiji the restriction as

to eating or speaking together existed not only between parents and

children-in-law, or brothers and sisters-in-law, but between brothers

and sisters of the same family, and also between first cousins.[297] In

Suffolk ‘it is (or was) very remarkable that neither father nor mother

of bride or bridegroom come with them to church’ at the weddings of

agricultural labourers; and it is said that at Russian weddings also the

parents are forbidden to be present, though the priest sometimes waives

the prohibition in favour of persons of the higher classes.[298]

There is, therefore, no _à priori_ inconceivability against the theory

that kicking and screaming at weddings, where they do not arise from

genuine reluctance, are really a tribute to conventional propriety; that,

at the marriages of the uncivilized, just as at their burials, shrieks

and violence take the place of tears, and a vigorous struggle argues

a modest deportment. The evidence of quite independent eye-witnesses

confirms this interpretation. The Thlinkeet Indian, on his wedding-day,

goes to the bride’s house and sits with his back to her door. All her

relations then ‘raise a song, to allure the coy bride out of the corner

where she has been sitting;’ after which she goes to sit by her husband’s

side; but ‘_all this time she must keep her head bowed down_,’ nor is she

allowed to take part in the festivities of the day.[299]

Atkinson, who was witness of the first visit of a Kirghiz bridegroom

to his wife, declares that the latter could only be persuaded by the

pressure of her female relations to see him at all; ‘after a display

of much coyness she consented, and was led by her friends to his

dwelling.’[300]

In Kamschatka the original etiquette was for women to cover their faces

with some kind of veil when they went out, and if they met any man on the

road whom they could not avoid, to stand with their backs to him until

he had passed. They would also, if a stranger entered their huts, turn

their face to the wall or else hide behind a curtain of nettles.[301]

Kamschatka, however, being the last place where one would have looked

for such prudery, it is possible that the feelings of the Greenlanders

were also operative in the marriage customs of the Kamschadals. These

were rather extraordinary, the form of capture being anything but a mere

symbol for an aspirant to matrimony. Such an one, having looked for a

bride in some neighbouring village (seldom in his own), would offer his

services to the parent for a fixed term, and after some time would ask

for leave to seize the daughter for his bride. This obtained, he would

seek to find her alone or ill-attended, the marriage being complete

on his tearing from her some of the coats, fish-nets, and straps with

which from the day of proposal she was constantly enveloped. This was

never an easy matter, for she was never left alone a single instant,

her mother and a number of old women accompanying her everywhere,

sleeping with her, and never losing her out of sight upon any pretext

whatever. Any attempt to execute his task entailed upon the suitor

such kicking, hair-pulling, and face-scratching, at the hands of this

female body-guard, that sometimes a year or more would elapse before

he was entitled to call himself a husband; nay, there is record of one

pertinacious bachelor who found himself at the end of seven years, in

consequence of such treatment, not a husband, but a cripple. If he were

disheartened by repeated failures he incurred great disgrace and lost

all claim to the alliance; and if the bride continued obdurate from real

dislike, he was ultimately expelled from the village.[302] But, however

well-disposed towards him she might be, she had always to simulate

refusal as a point of honour, and proof was always required ‘that she was

taken by surprise and made fruitless efforts to defend herself.’[303]

The Bushmen, again, generally betroth their daughters as children without

consulting them; but should a girl grow up unbetrothed her consent to be

married is as necessary as that of her parents to her lover’s suit, ‘and

on this occasion his attentions are received with an affectation of great

alarm and disinclination on her part.’[304]

If, then, Greenlanders, Kamschadals, Thlinkeet Indians, and even Bushmen,

carry their notions of propriety to the extent asserted by eye-witnesses,

it is scarcely surprising to find very similar rules of etiquette among

the more advanced Zulus of Africa or Bedouins of Arabia in their wedding

ceremonials; especially when we are told that in some parts Bedouin

women sit down and turn their backs to any man they cannot avoid on the

road, and refuse to take anything from the hands of a stranger.[305]

‘The principal idea of a Kaffir wedding seems to be to show the great

unwillingness of the girl to be transformed into a wife,’ for which

reason a Zulu wife simulates several attempts to escape.[306] Both the

Arabs of Sinai and the Aenezes enact the form of capture to the greatest

perfection; among the latter ‘the bashful girl’ runs from the tent of

one friend to another till she is caught at last, whilst among the

former she acquires permanent repute in proportion to her struggles of

resistance. And if a Sinai Arab marries a bride belonging to a distant

tribe, she is placed on a camel and led to her husband’s camp escorted by

women: during which procession ‘_decency obliges her to cry and sob most

bitterly_.’[307] Also, among the modern Egyptians, ‘if the bridegroom

is young, one of his friends has to _carry him_ part of the way to the

hareem, to _show his bashfulness_.’[308] So that where the carrying of

the bride or bridegroom is not merely due to the same feelings that

caused our own ancestors to add solemnity to their weddings by such

singular sights as blue postilions, it appears in many cases to be

nothing more than a prudish way of saying, that matrimony is and ought to

be an estate forced upon reluctant victims, not entered upon by voluntary

agents. The early Christian Church said the same; but where the saint and

the savage meet in sentiment they differ in expression.

Were it not for some of the concomitant and incidental signs, the bowed

or veiled head, the dishevelled hair, it might be said that the positive

statements of Cranz, Egede, Burchell, and other writers arose from

malobservation or from pure mistake. This objection, therefore, is of

little avail; and however difficult it may be to account for the presence

of such sentiments among tribes of so rude a type as the Esquimaux,

the Kamschadals, and the Bushmen, the fact remains, that in the cases

above cited the ‘form of capture’ is explicable as having its origin in

primitive conceptions of what is due to delicacy; as being, in fact, the

original expression of them in the language of pantomime so common to

savages.[309] And the presence of such feelings of delicacy may be often

suspected, even where they are not directly mentioned, in the ceremony

of capture; as, for instance, in the African kingdom of Futa, where the

form of capture prevails in the usual way, but where we have the indirect

evidence that for months after marriage the bride never stirs abroad

without a veil, and that Futa wives are ‘so bashful that they never

permit their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after their

marriage.’[310]

There is, however, no reason to press this explanation too far, nor

to account it the only efficient cause. Quite as potent, and perhaps

a more natural one, is dislike and disinclination on the part of the

bride, which compels the bridegroom to resort to force. The conditions

of savage life are a sufficient explanation of this, irrespective of any

old custom of capturing wives out of a tribe by reason of a prejudice

against marrying within it. A man proposes personally or mediately to

the parents or relations of the woman he fancies for a wife; if they

consent to accept him as a son-in-law and they agree as to a price, there

is a reserved stipulation on the part of the vendor: ‘_If you can get

her._’ In Tartary, in the thirteenth century, after such a bargain, the

daughter would flee to one of her kinsfolk to hide; the father would say

to the husband, ‘My daughter is yours; take her wheresoever you can find

her.’ The suitor, seeking with his friends till he found her, would then

take her by force and carry her home.[311] Here the girl’s reluctance is

not so much feigned as overridden, and is only so far formal in that it

is entirely disregarded. Often it is no mere ceremony on her part, but a

natural and genuine protest—a protest against being treated as a chattel,

not as an individual—but a protest which, opposed as it is to parental

persuasion and marital force, tends, as far as the husband is concerned,

to pass into the region of the merest ceremony.

A few instances will suffice to illustrate the co-operation of dislike

and force in savage matrimony. In some Californian tribes the consent

of the girl is necessary, although ‘if she violently opposes the match

she is seldom compelled to marry or to be sold.’ Among the Neshenam

tribe of the same people ‘the girl has no voice whatever in the matter,

and resistance on her part merely occasions brute force to be used by

her purchaser.’[312] So in the Utah country, where ‘families and tribes

living at peace would steal each others’ wives and children and sell

them as slaves,’ a wife is usually bought of her parents; but should she

refuse, ‘the warrior collects his friends, _carries off the recusant

fair_,’ and thus espouses her.[313] So among the Navajoes ‘the consent

of the father is absolute, and the one so purchased assents _or is taken

away by force_.’[314] It is the same with the Horse Indians of Patagonia.

There, as elsewhere, it is common for a cacique to have several wives,

and poor men only one, marriages being ‘made by sale more frequently

than by mutual agreement.’ The price is often high, and girls are

betrothed without their knowledge in infancy and married without their

consent at maturity. But ‘if a girl dislikes a match made for her she

resists; and although _dragged forcibly to the tent of her lawful owner_,

plagues him so much by her contumacy that he at last turns her away,

and sells her to the person on whom she has fixed her affections.’[315]

In Africa, Yorubas, Mandingoes, and Koossa Kafirs follow the custom of

infant betrothal (and it is worth notice as being quite in accordance

with the theory that kinship was originally traced through mothers,

that Yoruba, Mandingo, and Loango Africans, and some Esquimaux tribes,

regard the mother’s consent only as necessary to an engagement);[316]

but sometimes a Yoruba girl, when the time comes for her to fulfil her

mother’s engagement, preferring some other than the intended husband,

absolutely refuses to co-operate. ‘Then she is either teased and worried

into submission or the husband agrees to receive back her dowry and

release her.’[317] A Mandingo girl must either marry a suitor chosen for

her or remain ever afterwards unmarried. Should she refuse, the lover is

authorized by the parents ‘by the laws of the country to seize on the

girl as his slave.’[318] If a Koossa girl, bound by the contract of her

parents, ‘makes any attempt at resisting the union, corporal punishment

is even resorted to, in order to compel her submission.’[319]

It appears, therefore, that resistance on the part of the bride in many

cases procures her ultimate release, so that her wishes in the matter

are always an element to be considered. In all contracts of marriage,

to which she is seldom a party, there is accordingly, in the nature of

things, an implied covenant that a daughter shall be so far allowed

a voice in the matter that if she can make good her resistance she

shall not become the property of the intending purchaser. The frequency

with which it must have occurred that a girl would defeat a match she

disliked by flight, elopement, or resistance, would tend to create

a sort of common law right, for all daughters sold in marriage to a

certain ‘run’ for their independence;[320] and the amusement naturally

connected with the exercise of such a right would help to preserve the

custom in a modified form; so that, however slight in some cases might

be the modesty of the bride or her dislike of her suitor, her friends,

if only for the sport of the thing, would gladly enact the fiction of an

outrage to be resented, of a woman to be defended. In all the interesting

cases of the form of capture cited by Sir John Lubbock it appears that

in eight (that is, among the Mantras, the Kalmucks, the Fuejians, the

Fijians, the New Zealanders, the Papuans of New Guinea, the Philippine

Islanders, and the African Kafirs and Futas), the ceremony affords the

bride a chance of an effectual escape from a match she dislikes. Should

she fly, should she hide successfully, or should her friends defend her

successfully, the contract between her parents and suitor becomes null

and void; or sometimes, as among the Zulus and Bassutos, the price for

her is raised.[321] And it is remarkable with what precision the rules of

the chase have been elaborated in many instances; as by the Oleepas of

Central California, among whom, if a bride is found twice out of three

times, she is legally the seeker’s; and the bridegroom, if he fails the

first time, is allowed a second and final attempt a few weeks later.

‘The simple result is, that if the girl likes him she hides where she is

easily found; but if she disapproves of the match a dozen Indians cannot

find her.’[322]

Other feelings would also be present to sustain the pretence of

wife-capture. For the savage parent, in parting with his daughter for a

favourable settlement, does not act from gratuitous cruelty; he provides

for her future as best he can, sometimes in accordance with her wishes,

sometimes against them. As a rule marriage for her is a change for the

worse; but if she does not dislike the bridegroom to the extent of

availing herself of her prescriptive and real chance of escape, her

natural feelings for her parents and relations would make it incumbent

on her at least to affect a dutiful regret at leaving them (in cases

where she does), by a half-bashful, half-serious resistance. It would

be difficult to find a case of capture, whether in form or in fact,

which is not readily explicable as simply the outcome of the natural

affections and their protest against so artificial an arrangement as

marriage by purchase; for with marriage by purchase the form of capture

always co-exists, so that capture was not necessarily an earlier mode

of marriage than that by purchase or agreement. The mock fights between

the party of the bride and that of the bridegroom among so many Indian

tribes;[323] the dances, lasting several days, during which it is the

business of the squaws to keep the bridegroom at a distance from his

bride, among the Tucanas of South America;[324] the similar duty which

devolves on the matrons of the tribe at Sumatran weddings;[325] the mock

skirmishes at Arab weddings, and the efforts of the negresses to keep the

bridegroom away from the camel of the bride;[326] these are surely more

intelligible, as arising from the rude ideas and customs of savage life,

than as being survivals, artificially preserved, of a time when the bride

was really fought for or stolen; and if such explanation is sufficient,

should it not logically be admitted before resorting to the hypothesis

of a practice whose very existence is rather an inference from such

ceremonies than a cause observable in actual operation?

To pass to a third and quite distinct class of marriages by capture,

in which the essential element is not maidenly bashfulness nor real

repugnance, but the voluntary elopement of a girl with her lover, in

defeat of a prior contract of betrothal. The large part which questions

of profit and property play in savage betrothals can never be lost sight

of, in estimating the causes of real wife abduction, either within or

without the tribe. The primary conception of a daughter is a saleable

possession, a source of profit, to her clan in marketings with other

clans or to her parents in their bargains in her own clan. This fact

alone militates against the supposition of the wide prevalence of

female infanticide in primitive communities, the prejudice being rather

in favour of killing the boys than the girls; not solely for the use

of the latter as slaves and labourers, but for the price which even

among Fuejians or Bushmen is payable in some form or another for their

companionship as wives. Abiponian mothers spared their girls oftener than

their boys, because their sons when grown up would want wherewithal to

purchase a wife, and so tend to impoverish them; whilst their daughters

would bring them in money by their sale in that capacity.[327] To raise

the price by limiting the supply was also the reason why the Guanas of

America preferred to bury their girls alive rather than their boys.[328]

From this view of daughters as saleable commodities comes polygamy for

the rich, polyandry, or illicit elopement, for the poor. Among the Hos of

India so high at one time was the price in cattle placed by parents on

their daughters that the large number of adult unmarried girls became a

‘very peculiar feature in the social state of every considerable village

of the Kohlán.’ What, then, was the result? That ‘young men counteracted

the machinations of avaricious parents against the course of true love

by _forcibly carrying off the girl_,’ thus avoiding extortion by running

away with her. The parents in such cases had to submit to terms proposed

by arbitrators; but at last wife-abduction became so common that it could

only be checked by the limitation by general consent of the number of

cattle payable at marriage.[329]

‘A very singular scene,’ it is said, ‘may sometimes be noticed in the

markets of Singbhoom. A young man suddenly makes a pounce on a girl

and carries her off bodily, his friends covering the retreat (like a

group from the picture of the Rape of the Sabines). This is generally

a _summary method of surmounting the obstacles that cruel parents may

have placed in the lovers’ path_; but though it is sometimes done in

anticipation of the favourable inclination of the girl herself, and in

spite of her struggles and tears, no disinterested person interferes,

and the girls, late companions of the abducted maiden, often applaud the

exploit.’[330]

In Afghanistan the pecuniary value of women has given rise to the curious

custom of assessing part of the fines in criminal cases in a certain

number of young women payable in atonement as wives to the plaintiff or

to his relations from the family of the defendant. Thus murder is or was

expiated by the payment of twelve young women; the cutting off a hand,

an ear, or a nose by that of six; the breaking of a tooth by that of

three; a wound above the forehead by that of one. This was the logical

result of the state of thought which produces wife-purchase; but there

was also another. For in the country parts, where matches generally begin

in attachment, an enterprising lover may avoid the obstacle of parental

consent by a form of capture, which has a legal sanction, though it does

not exempt the captor from subsequent payment. This consists in a man’s

‘seizing an opportunity of cutting off a lock of her (the woman’s) hair,

snatching away her veil, or throwing a sheet over her, and claiming her

as his affianced wife.’ But the most common expedient is an ordinary

elopement; though this is held an outrage to a family equivalent to the

murder of one of its members; and being pursued with the same rancour,

is often the cause of long and bloody wars between the clans; for as the

fugitive couple are never refused an asylum, ‘the seduction of a woman of

one Oolooss by a man of another, or a man’s eloping with a girl of his

own Oolooss,’ is the commonest cause of feuds between the clans.[331]

Love attachments, in defeat of parental plans, lead to very similar

results in Bokhara. For ‘the daughter of a Turcoman has a high price;

and the swain, in despair of making a legitimate purchase, seizes his

sweetheart, seats her behind him on the same horse, and gallops off

to the nearest camp, where the parties are united, and separation

is impossible. The parents and relations pursue the lovers, and the

marriage is adjusted by an intermarriage with some female relation of

the bridegroom, while he himself becomes bound to pay so many camels and

horses as the price of his bride.’[332]

There is, therefore, evidence to justify the theory that the form of

capture may often be explained as an attempt to regulate by law the

danger to a tribe arising from too frequent elopements, naturally

resulting from the abuse of the parental right of selling daughters. In

Sumatra the defeat of matrimonial plans by an elopement with a preferred

suitor is so common as to be sanctioned and regulated by law, being

known as the system of marriage by _telari gadis_; the father in such

a case having to pay the fine to which he would have been liable for

bestowing his daughter after engagement to another suitor, and only being

allowed to recover her, if he catches her in immediate pursuit. ‘When

the parties,’ says Mr. McLennan, ‘cannot agree about the price, nothing

is more common among the Kalmucks, Kirghiz, Nogais, and Circassians than

to carry the lady off by actual force of arms. The wooer having once

got the lady into his _yurt_, she is his wife by the law, and peace is

established by her relations coming to terms as to the price.’ So too

in England, elopements have often preceded and promoted more definite

marriage settlements, or, with some slight observances, have stood

legally as a substitute for them.

Considering, then, that the affections and wishes do not count for

nothing even among savages; considering that among savages, more even

than in civilized life, marriage is a question of property and of means,

so that, whilst the richest members of a tribe almost universally have

several wives, it is often all that the poorer can do to get a wife

at all, we have a set of circumstances leading naturally sometimes to

voluntary elopement on the part of the girl, in defeat of her parents,

sometimes to literal wife-capture by a man otherwise unable to become a

husband. This condition of things leads of necessity to polyandry and

wife-robbery. In some Australian tribes, owing to a disproportion between

the sexes, many men have to steal a wife from a neighbouring horde. But

it is not their normal recognized mode of marriage. On the contrary,

their laws on this subject are somewhat elaborate; and as it appears

that before that state of society in which a daughter belongs to her

father there is one in which she belongs to her mother, and perhaps a

still prior state in which she belongs to her tribe, so from their birth

Australian girls are appropriated to certain males of the tribe, nor can

the parents annul the obligation. If the male dies the mother may then

bestow her daughter on whom she will, for by the death of her legal owner

the girl becomes to some extent the property of her relations, who have

certain claims on her services for the procurement of food. But to the

surrender of a girl by her mother the full consent of the whole tribe is

necessary; and if, as sometimes happens, ‘the young people, listening

rather to the dictates of inclination than those of law, improvise a

marriage by absconding together,’ they incur the fatal enmity of the

whole tribe.[333] According to Bonwick, a Tasmanian or Australian woman

was never stolen contrary to her expectations or wishes. Only if all

other schemes to have her own way failed, would a girl face the penalty

of having ‘the spear of the disappointed, the spear of the guardian, and

the spears of the tribe’ thrown at her, for her breach of tribal law.[334]

The conception of the daughters of a clan as its property, as a source

of contingent wealth to it, of additional income to it in sheep, dogs,

or whatever the medium of exchange, tends to keep up in many cases that

prohibition to marry in the same clan or subdivision of a tribe which is

known as exogamy. Among the Hindu Kafirs it is said to be uncertain why

a man may not sell his girls to his own tribe, and why a man must always

buy his wife from another; but it is certain that for this reason the

more girls a man has born to him the better he is pleased and the richer

his tribe becomes.[335] A Khond father distributes among the heads of the

families, belonging to his branch of a tribe, the sum raised on behalf of

a son-in-law by subscription from the son-in-law’s branch. But, supposing

a great inequality of wealth to arise between different clans, originally

united by profitable intermarriages, it might become more profitable

to sell within the clan than outside it, so that the same motives of

interest which, under some circumstances, would tend to encourage exogamy

would under others lead to the opposite principle, a rich bridegroom of

the same clan being preferable to a poor one of another, whether the gain

accrued to a girl’s parents or her clan. It is, perhaps, for this reason

that a Hindu Kooch incurs a fine if he marries a woman of another clan,

becoming a bondsman till his wife redeems him; that is, till she pays

back to his clan or its chief what the bridegroom, by purchasing her, has

alienated from the use of the tribe.[336] On the other hand, the reason

given by the Khonds for marrying women from distant places was, that they

gave much smaller sums than for women of their own tribe.[337]

Exogamy and endogamy would thus co-exist, as the customs of tribes that

have attained to a more or less complete recognition of the rights of

property, and are so far advanced as to be capable of preserving complex

rules of social organization. Marriages, therefore, under either _régime_

are matters generally of friendly settlement, of ordinary contract; and

where such arrangements are defeated by the perversity of the principal

parties—namely, the bride or the bridegroom—what more natural than the

device of giving legal sanction to an elopement by settling a subsequent

compensation with the parent?

The custom of exogamy is so widely spread over the world that its origin

must be sought in conditions as prevalent as itself, and it is possible

that it arose out of the same condition which certainly sustains it

and is co-extensive with itself, namely, from the marketable position

of women. That female infanticide should have led to it is improbable,

not only from the comparative rarity of the practice among the _rudest_

tribes, but from the negative instance of the Todas, a wild Indian

hill-tribe, who, notwithstanding the scarcity of their women, and a

scarcity actually attributed to former female infanticide, ‘never

contract marriage with the other tribes, though living together on most

friendly terms.’[338] Judging _à priori_, we should expect to find as of

earlier date a prejudice in favour of tribal exclusiveness, of strict

endogamy. The idea of the Abors that marriage out of the clan is a sin

only to be washed out by sacrifice—a sin so great as to cause war among

the elements, and even obscuration of the sun and moon—has a more archaic

appearance than the contrary principle; and the confinement of marriages

to a few families of known purity of descent is characteristic of some

of the lowest Hindu castes.[339] The prejudice against foreign women is

so strong that there is often a tendency to regard female prisoners of

war as merely slaves, as not of the same rank with the real wives of

their captors. Thus, ‘though the different tribes of the Aht nation are

frequently at war with one another, women are not captured from other

tribes for marriage, but only to be kept as slaves. The idea of slavery

connected with capture is so common that a free-born Aht would hesitate

to marry a woman taken in war, whatever her rank had been in her own

tribe.’[340] The Caribs, too, if they kept female prisoners as wives

always regarded them as slaves, as standing on a lower level than their

legitimate wives.[341]

Leaving, however, the obscure problem of the origin of exogamy, there

is a point of view from which both that and endogamy are one. For

exogamy as regards the subdivisions of a tribe is endogamy as regards

the tribe itself, tending in fact to preserve tribal unity and to check

an indefinite divergency of interests and dialects. For example, where

a Hindoo caste or tribe is composed of several Gotrams, no person of

whom may marry an individual of the same Gotram, it is evident that

the unity of the tribe is actually sustained by the exogamy of its

constituent parts. Such a custom therefore, howsoever originated, would,

as serviceable in maintaining tribal unity against hostile neighbouring

people, tend to survive from motives of common expediency, from its

adaptation to the interests of peace; a beneficial result of the system

which in Mr. Bancroft’s account of the Thlinkeet and Kutchin Indians

clearly appears.[342] The Thlinkeets are nationally divided into two

great clans, under the totems of the Wolf and the Raven, and these two

are again subdivided into numerous sub-totems. ‘In this clanship some

singular social facts present themselves. People are at once thrust

widely apart and yet drawn together. Tribes of the same clan may not war

on each other, but at the same time members of the same clan may not

marry each other. Thus the young Wolf warrior must seek his mate among

the Ravens.... _Obviously this singular social fancy tends greatly to

keep the various tribes of the nation at peace._’ The Kutchins, again,

are divided into three castes, resident in different territories, no two

persons of the same caste being allowed to marry. ‘_This system operates

strongly against war between the tribes_, as in war it is caste against

caste, not tribe against tribe. As the father is never of the same caste

as the son, who receives clanship from the mother, there can never be

international war without ranging fathers and sons against each other.’

So among the Khonds, who punish intermarriage between persons of the same

tribe with death, the intervention of the women was always essential to

peace, as they were neutral between the tribe of their fathers and that

of their husbands.[343] But it is difficult to think that, if hostile

relations between exogamous clans became permanent, the several clans

would still insist on exogamous marriages as the only marriages legally

valid, and consequently regard the use of force or fraud as the only

legitimate title to a wife.

It seems indeed certain that wherever the rule of exogamy exists it

may be analysed into a prohibition to marry within the divisions of a

larger group; that larger group being consciously recognised as uniting

the divergent families by resemblance of dialect, common political

ties, or a traditional common descent. The Kalmucks, for instance,

call themselves ‘the peculiar people,’ or ‘the four allies,’ and any

danger of their national dissolution is obviously diminished by the

very fact of the exogamy of their four clans. The Circassians, whose

constituent brotherhoods are exogamous, by the occasional assemblies of

the brotherhoods for the settlement of disputes, show a consciousness of

their political unity, which by the exogamy of the brotherhoods they help

to maintain. The Hindu castes preserve their mutual exclusiveness by the

very fact of compelling all their constituent families to intermingle

in marriage, and so preventing any one of them from dissolving the

common relationship by absolute separation or independent growth. So

that exogamy rather sustains than prevents a system of marriages

within the same stock, and is a mark of a higher conception of social

organisation, when people have learned to classify themselves with

respect to their neighbours, when tribal and personal property is well

established, and when, consequently, marriages between the groups can

be effected by purchase better than by violence. Exogamy therefore as

the product or concomitant of a somewhat advanced state of thought, not

of utter barbarism, would never make marriages by capture a necessity

of existence; but, if it did, it would argue so much culture in a tribe

capable of maintaining such rules, as would equally justify us in

ascribing to them moral feelings, not less advanced and refined than

those involved in their adherence to so restrictive a political system.

South Australia supplies a typical illustration of the confusion relating

to intertribal marriages which arises from the vague use of the word

_tribe_. For wherever there is reason to suspect that the word clan or

family should stand for the word tribe, it is probable that the exogamy

predicated of the tribe only prevails between its constituent elements;

in other words, that it is only, as among the Kalmucks, Circassians,

or Hindu castes, an extended form of the principle of endogamy. Thus,

Collins, describing wife-capture in New South Wales, says that ‘it

is believed’ the women so taken are always selected from women of a

different tribe from that of the males, and from one with whom they are

at enmity; that as wives ‘they are incorporated into the tribes to which

their husbands belong, and but seldom quit them for others.’ But he uses

the word tribe as convertible with the word family, as when he speaks of

the natives near Port Jackson being distributed into families, each under

the government of its own head, and deriving its name from its place of

residence.[344] And the statements of Captain Hunter, a previous writer,

that the natives are associated ‘in tribes of many families together,’

living apparently without a fixed residence; that ‘the tribe takes its

name, from the place of their general residence;’ and that, the different

families wander in different directions for food, but unite on occasion

of disputes with another tribe, make it still more probable that when

Collins spoke of different tribes he meant merely, different families,

or groups, which with all their separate wanderings united sometimes in

cases of common danger. So when Captain Hunter himself says that ‘there

is some reason to suppose that most of their wives are taken by force

from the tribes with whom they are at variance, as the females bear

no proportion to the males,’ we may take it that by tribes he means

families, and families who recognise their community of blood when a

really different tribe provokes their hostility by assembling as a tribe

themselves.[345] Mr. Stanbridge, who spent eighteen years in the wilds of

Victoria, corroborates this view; for, according to him, each tribe has

its own boundaries, the land of which is parcelled out amongst families

and carefully transmitted by direct descent; these boundaries being so

sacredly maintained that the member of no one family will venture on the

lands of a neighbouring one without invitation. The several families (or

tribes) unite for mutual purposes under a chief. The women often, but

not always, marry into distant tribes; they are generally betrothed in

their infancy, but if they grow up unbetrothed the father’s consent must

be solicited; failing him, the brother’s; then the uncle’s; and last of

all that of a council or a chief of a tribe.[346] That force was ever the

normal method by which marriages were effected in Australia, there is no

proof; that, on the contrary, mutual likings often set the law, is proved

by the story of the native captive girl, who, after living among the

colonists for some time, expressed a desire to go away and be married to

a young native of her acquaintance; albeit that she left him after three

days, returning sadly beaten and jealous of the other wife.[347]

Quite distinct, again, either from the real or pretended reluctance

of a savage girl to become a bride, or from the custom of forcing an

avaricious parent to a settlement by the shorter process of taking first

and paying afterwards, is the custom of stealing women from the same

or a neighbouring clan, a custom which prevailed widely in Ireland and

Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which in the

latter country has been ‘glorified in a whole literature of songs and

ballads.’[348]

That polygamy and wife-purchase and artificial tribal regulations often

lead to such a result cannot be denied; but that it is anywhere a

system, sustained by prejudices, whencesoever derived, seems completely

unwarranted by the evidence hitherto collected. The Coinmen of Patagonia,

who made annual inroads on the Tekeenica tribe, killing the men and

carrying off not only the women but the children, dogs, arrows, spears,

and canoes, seem to have been actuated rather by the ordinary motives

of freebooters (by such motives, for instance, as induced our early

convict settlers in Tasmania to set off with their bullock-chains to

make captives of the native women[349]) than by any scruples of marrying

relations at home. Carib wives taken in war were accounted slaves; and

so far were the Caribs from being dependent on aggression for their

wives, that before their customs were modified by acquaintance with the

Christians their only legitimate wives were their cousins.[350] If a man

had no cousin to marry, or put off doing so till it was too late, he

might then marry some non-relative, with the consent of her parents. At

the festival that followed a successful war the parents vied with one

another in offering their daughters as wives to those who were praised by

their captains as having fought with bravery. The Caribs of the continent

differed from those of the islands in that men and women spoke the same

language, not having corrupted their native tongue by marriages with

foreign women.[351] According to Humboldt, the language of the Caribs

of the continent was the same, from the source of the Rio Branco to the

steppes of Cumana; and the pride of race which led them to withdraw from

every other people, and was the cause of the failure of all missionary

efforts that tried to combine them with villages containing people of

another nation and speaking another idiom, would surely have militated

against making exogamy a preliminary condition of matrimony.[352]

Humboldt, indeed, says that polygamy was more extensively practised by

the Caribs and other nations that ‘preserved the custom of carrying off

young girls from the neighbouring tribe;’ but it would be contrary to

all previous accounts of the people to suppose these were their only

wives, such a supplement to domestic felicity being everywhere the

common reward, though seldom the chief object, of successful war. The

curious difference in the language of the men and of the women found to

exist among the Caribs of the West Indian Archipelago, and attributed

by tradition to the conquest of a former people on the islands, whose

wives the conquerors appropriated, has perhaps been rather exaggerated,

for in a list of 488 words and phrases employed by both sexes, in only

36 is there any difference marked between the language of the men and

that of the women. The origin of the difference may be doubted, as there

were also words and phrases used by the old men of the people which

the younger ones might not use; and there was a war-dialect of which

neither women, girls, or boys had any knowledge.[353] But probably the

difference arose from a custom similar to that of the Zulus, which makes

it unlawful for a woman to use any word containing the sound of her

father-in-law’s name or of the names of her husband’s male relations.

‘Whenever the emphatic syllable of either of their proper names occurs

in any other word, she must avoid it, by either substituting an entirely

new word, or at least another syllable in its place. Hence _this custom

has given rise to an almost distinct language among the women_.’[354] In

consequence of this _Hlonipa_ custom, according to another witness, ‘_the

language at this present time almost presents the phenomenon of a double

one_.’[355] That the Caribs maintained the common etiquette of reserve

between parents and children-in-law,[356] makes it not improbable that

the reserve extended itself to their language, and thus produced the same

phenomenon that we find in South Africa.

In the same way other cases of wife-capture appear simply in the light of

savage lawlessness, which may have been more common among quite primitive

tribes than it is in their nearest modern representatives; but which, if

it ever was widely prevalent, is most unlikely to have been perpetuated

in symbol, by a form of capture. If then the form is easily explicable

on other grounds, such as have been suggested, we have a reason the less

for supposing in the past a state of things which would exclude from

the relations between male and female the happy influence of that mutual

affection which has been shown not to have been entirely absent even

among, perhaps, the rudest of our species, the aborigines of Australia

or the Veddahs of Ceylon, and which is certainly disseminated more or

less widely, outside the human race, through a large part of the animal

creation.

It is probably impossible to resuscitate in imagination a picture of

primitive times. It is with the lower societies of the world as with the

lower animal organisms: the more they are studied, the more wonderful is

the complexity of structure they unfold. Tribal and subtribal divisions

of communities, tribal and subtribal divisions of territory, strong

distinctions of rank, stringent rules of etiquette, are found on all

sides to characterise populations in other circumstances of life scarcely

less rude than the brute creation around them. The first beginnings of

social evolution are lost, nor can they be observed in any known races

that appear to have advanced the least distance from the starting-point

of progress. But, as there is no reason to suppose that the external

conditions of primitive man were ever very different from those of

existing tribes; that those, for instance, of the shell-mound builders or

the cave-dwellers differed widely from those of existing Ahts or Bushmen,

so there is nothing unreasonable in believing, that the earliest human

denizens of the globe were endowed with the same rudiments of feelings

that prevail among them, and that these should, even in very early

times, have produced very similar social institutions. That Greeks and

Egyptians, Chinese and Hindus, had legends ascribing marriage to the

invention of a particular legislator, thereby implying there was a time

when marriage was not, no more proves that there was ever a time when

some sort of marriage was unrecognised than the many legends of the

origin of fire prove that mankind were ever destitute of the blessing

of its warmth. A minimum of reflection on the subject would produce the

legend, just as reflections on the world’s origin have produced countless

legends of its creation, of a time when it too was nonexistent. And

it will be found, wherever any known savage tribe really practises no

wedding customs, that the fact of the marriage is distinctly recognised,

either by payment in kind or labour by the bridegroom or by some

symbolical act notifying the union to all fellow-tribesmen. The Veddahs,

for instance, according to Tennant, used no marriage rites; but another

writer mentions, that on the day of marriage the husband received from

his bride a cord twisted by herself, which he had to wear round his waist

till his death, as a symbol of the lastingness of the union between them.

The Kherias of India, who have no word for marriage in their language,

give public recognition to the fact by certain rites and festivities,

closely analogous to those in vogue in neighbouring tribes. The Coroadas

of Brazil have no marriage solemnity, but the suitor presents the bride’s

parents with fruit or game, as a tacit engagement to support her by the

chase. Such a tacit expression of willingness and ability to take good

care of his wife is a common symbolical act among savages, even the

rudest; whilst the fact that for the married pair henceforth there will

be a union of life and fortune is indicated by many a wedding custom, of

no doubtful meaning, as by the eating of a cake together, or by the Dyak

custom of making the married couple sit together on two bars of iron, ‘to

intimate the wish of the bystanders that blessings as lasting and health

as vigorous as that metal may attend the pair.’

But symbolical acts like these—and they might be multiplied

indefinitely—presuppose an advanced state of thought and feeling, behind

which we cannot get in the observation of any existing savage tribes; and

since they are common wherever the pretence of capture is common, that

pretence may well be symbolical too; but symbolical, not of an earlier

system of marriage, but of a conventional regard for good manners.

Wherever the pretence of capture exists, it exists amid conditions

of life so far removed from what might naturally be conceived as the

most archaic, that it is quite legitimate to attribute the decorous

reluctance of the bride and the resistance of her relations at weddings

to such feelings as have been proved to prevail upon such occasions, and

so to consider the bride’s behaviour as something quite unconnected with

the lawless practice of wife-abduction, a practice which undoubtedly

prevails to a certain extent in the savage world (chiefly in consequence

of artificial social arrangements), which may have prevailed to a still

greater extent when men lived in the caves of Périgord or upon former

continents, but which it is incredible should ever have survived by

transmission as a symbol, as a custom worthy of religious preservation.

VIII.

_THE FAIRY-LORE OF SAVAGES._

A comparison of some of the fancies of the rudest known tribes of

the earth concerning the nature of the sun, the moon, and the stars,

proves abundantly not only that the demand for a reason for things is

a principle operative in every stage of human development, but that

the primitive explanation of things is sought in the occurrences of

daily experience and given in terms and figures originally applied to

terrestrial objects. From a philosophy of nature of so rude a type and

so humble an origin spring many of those marvellous traditions, which in

after times rank as the mythology, or perhaps serve as the religion, of

the people among whom they had birth.

To begin with some of the astro-mythological ideas of the Australians.

Mr. Stanbridge mentions the astonishment with which, as he sat by

his camp fire, he listened for the first time to the remarks of two

Australian natives as they pointed to the beautiful constellations of

Castor and Pollux, of the Pleiades and Orion. These men belonged to a

race who had ‘the reputation of being lowest in the scale of mankind,’

who were ‘cannibals of the lowest description,’ and ‘who had no name

for numerals above two;’ yet they could explain the wanderings of the

moon, by the story that, being once discovered trying to persuade the

wife of a certain star in Canis Major to elope with him, he was beaten

and put to flight by the angry husband. As so frequently elsewhere, most

of the stars were bound by the ties of human relationship, being wives,

brothers, sisters, or mothers to one another. The stars in the belt

of Orion were believed to be a group of young men dancing, whilst the

Pleiades were girls who played to them as they danced. Two large stars in

the fore legs of Centaurus were two brave brothers who speared Tchingal

to death, and the east stars of Crux were the points of the spears that

pierced his body.[357]

Few tribes of known savages appear to be without conceptions of a similar

nature. The Tasmanians, according to Bonwick, were no exception to the

connection of theology with astronomy. To them Capella was a kangaroo

pursued by Castor and Pollux, whose smoke as it was roasted might be seen

till the autumn. The Pleiades were maidens who courted the kangaroo

hunters of Orion and dug up roots for their suppers. Two other stars were

two black men who of old appeared suddenly on a hill and threw fire down

to earth for the use of its inhabitants; whilst two other luminaries were

two women whom a sting-ray had killed as they dived for cray-fish, but

whom these same fire-bringers restored to life, by placing stinging ants

on their breasts; then escorting them to heaven, after they had first

killed the sting-ray.[358]

Bushman star-lore is framed in exactly the same way, the planets of

distant solar systems sinking into the insignificance of daily African

surroundings. What is the moon but a man who, having incurred the wrath

of the sun, is pierced by his knife till he is nearly destroyed, and

who, having implored mercy, grows from the small piece left him, till

he is again large enough for the stabbing process to recommence? What

is the Milky Way but some wood ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by

a girl, that her people might be able to see their way home at night?

Other stars are reduced to mortal origin, or identified with certain

lions, tortoises, or clouds, that have place in Bushman mythology; nor

does it lie beyond their limits of belief that the sun should once have

been seen sitting by the wayside as he travelled on earth, and that

the jackal’s back is black to this day because he carried that burning

substance on his back.[359] This sun they believe was once a mortal on

earth who radiated light from his body, but only for a short space round

his house; till some children were sent to throw him as he slept into the

sky, whence he has ever since shone over the earth.[360] These children

belonged to an earlier race of Bushmen; and it is an odd coincidence that

in Victoria as in South Africa the belief about the sun is associated

with the tradition of a race that preceded both Bushmen and Australians

in their present homes. In the Australian creed, the earth lay in

darkness, till one of the former race threw an emu’s egg into space,

where it became the sun. That former race was translated in various forms

to the heavens, where they made all the celestial bodies, and where they

continue to cause all the good and evil that happens on earth. Such

traditions may point to a fact; for both Australians and Bushmen may be

degenerate from a better social type than they now present; but the fact

that, even if degenerate, they should preserve such tales and fictions,

makes it not inconceivable that such tales should arise, as spontaneous

products of the mind, among tribes that seem neither to have lapsed from

a higher condition, nor ever to have emerged from their primeval state of

barbarism.

Of the Esquimaux, Egede observes that ‘their notion about the stars is

that some of them have been men and others different sorts of animals

or fishes.’[361] Here two stars are two persons at a singing combat, or

two rival women taking each other by the hair; those other three are

certain Greenlanders who, when once out seal-catching, failed to find

their way home again and were taken to heaven. It is true such fancies,

taken primarily from Cranz, must be received with the reservation that

he makes, namely, that they were only harboured by the weaker heads

of Greenland, and that the natives had art enough to play off on the

Europeans quite as marvellous stories as any they received.[362] But the

possible reality of such belief is vouched for by other testimony from

all parts of the globe, of which two instances, taken from the Hervey

Islanders and the Thlinkeet Indians, will suffice to illustrate the

general character. According to the former, a twin boy and girl were

badly treated by their mother; so they left their home and leapt into

the sky, whither they were also followed by their parents, and where

all four may still be seen shining; ‘brother and dearly-loved sister,

still linked together, pursue their never-ceasing flight, resolved

never again to meet their justly-enraged parents.’[363] The Thlinkeet

Indians ascribe to a being called Yehl the liberation of the world from

its pristine darkness; for, amid the many conflicting stories told of

him, it is agreed that he it was who obtained light for men at a time

when ‘sun, moon, and stars were kept by a rich chief in separate boxes

which he allowed no one to touch.’ Yehl, having become grandson to this

chief, cried one day so much for these boxes that his grandfather let

him have one. ‘He opened it, and lo! there were stars in the sky.’ The

grandparent was next cheated out of the moon in the same way; but to get

the sunbox Yehl had to refuse food and become really ill, and then its

owner only parted with it on condition that it should not be opened. The

prohibition, however, was unheeded. Yehl turned into a raven, flew off

with the box, and blessed mankind with the light of the sun.[364]

From these samples of the fairy tales of savages, it is clear that, in

addition to the myths which arise from forgotten etymologies, there

are many others which are not formed at all by this process of gradual

forgetfulness, but spring directly from the use of the intellect and

the imagination, in obedience to the impulse to find a reason for

everything. To observe peculiarities in nature is the beginning of

science; to account for them in any way is science itself, true or false.

The science of savages is not limited to the skies, but is directed to

everything that calls for notice on earth; nor in the stories invented

by them to answer the various problems of existence, are they a whit

behind the traditions of European folk-lore on similar subjects,

their explanations of natural peculiarities disclosing quite as vivid

imaginative powers as the stories of the white race concerning birds or

beasts.

Let us take, for instance, as a parallel to the German reason for the owl

flying in solitude by night (namely, that when set to watch the wren,

imprisoned in a mousehole, he fell asleep, and was so ashamed at letting

him thus escape that he has never since dared show himself by day), the

story of the rude Ahts, made to account for the melancholy note of the

loon as it is heard flying about the wild lakes of Vancouver’s Island;

and as a good instance of the resemblance in construction of plot often

found in very distant regions, let us place side by side with it a story

of the Basutos in the south of Africa:—

_THE AHT STORY._

Two fishermen went one day in two canoes to catch halibut.

But while one of them caught many, the other caught none. So

the latter, angered by the taunts of his more fortunate but

physically weaker companion, bethought himself how he might

take all his fish from him by force, and cause him to return

home fishless and ashamed. Suddenly, whilst his friend was

pulling up a fish, he knocked him on the head with the wooden

club he used for killing halibut, and, to prevent the tale

ever being told, cut out his companion’s tongue, and took the

fish home to his own wife. When the tongueless man arrived at

the village, and his friends came to enquire of his sport, he

could only answer by a noise resembling the note of the loon.

‘The great spirit, Quawteaht, was so angry at all this, that

he changed the injured Indian into a loon, and the other into

a crow; and the loon’s plaintive cry now is the voice of the

fisherman trying to make himself understood.’[365]

_THE BASUTO STORY._

Two brothers, having gone in different directions to make

their fortunes, met again, after sundry adventures, the elder

enriched by a pack of dogs, the younger by a large number of

cows. The younger offered his brother as many of these cows

as he pleased, with the exception of a certain white one.

This he would not part with; so as they went home, and the

younger brother was drinking from a pool, Macilo, the elder,

seized his brother’s head and held it under the water till

he was dead. Then he buried the body, and covered it with a

stone, and proceeded to drive back the whole flock as his own.

He had not, however, gone far, before a small bird perched

itself on the horn of the white cow and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has

killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’

Twice did Macilo kill the bird with a stone, but each time it

reappeared and uttered the same words. So the third time he

killed it he burnt it, and threw its ashes to the winds. Then

proudly he entered his village, and when they all enquired for

his brother, he said that they had taken different roads, and

that he was ignorant where he was. The white cow was greatly

admired, but suddenly a small bird perched itself on its horns

and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of

the white cow he coveted.’ Thus, through a bird into which

the heart of the murdered man had been transformed, did the

truth become known, and everyone departed with horror from the

presence of the murderer.[366]

European folk-lore accounts for the redness of the robin’s breast,

either by the theory that he extracted a thorn from the thorn-crown of

Christ, or by the theory that he daily bears a drop of water to quench

the flames of hell. For either reason he might be justly called the

friend of man; but for the bird’s friendliness the Chippewya Indians

give a more poetical explanation than either of the above. There was

once, they say, a hunter so ambitious that his only son should signalise

himself by endurance, when he came to the time of life to undergo the

fast preparatory to his choosing his guardian spirit, that after the lad

had fasted for eight days, his father still pressed him to persevere. But

next day, when the father entered the hut, his son had paid the penalty

of violated nature, and in the form of a robin had just flown to the top

of the lodge. There, before he flew away to the woods, he entreated his

father not to mourn his transformation. ‘I shall be happier,’ he said,

‘in my present state than I could have been as a man. I shall always be

the friend of men and keep near their dwellings; I could not gratify your

pride as a warrior, but I will cheer you by my songs.... I am now free

from cares and pains, my food is furnished by the fields and mountains,

and my path is in the bright air.’[367]

Not less poetical is the Hervey Islanders’ account of the origin of some

peculiarities among fishes, and notably of the well-known conformation of

the head of the common sole. They relate how Ina, leaving the house of

her rich parents because she had been beaten and scolded for suffering

the arch-thief, Nyana, to steal certain treasures left in her charge,

resolved to make her way to the sea beach, and from thence to the Sacred

Isle that lay across the sea at the place where the sun set. Arrived

at the shore, she first asked the small fish, the _avini_, to bear her

across the sea; but the avini, unable to support her weight, soon let

her fall into the water, for which Ina in her anger struck it repeatedly

with her foot, thereby causing those beautiful stripes on its sides which

are called to this day ‘Ina’s tattooing.’ Trying next the _paoro_, and

meeting with the same mischance, she caused it in the same way to bear

ever after those blue marks which are now its glory; and it is said to be

historically true that tattooing on that island ‘was simply an imitation

of the stripes on the avini and the paoro.’ Then the _api_, a white

fish, incurring the same displeasure, became at once and for ever of

an intensely black hue. The sole, indeed, carried Ina farther than the

others, but no farther than the breakers by the reef; and Ina, now wild

with rage, stamped with such fury on its head that its underneath eye

was removed to the upper side, and thus it was condemned ever afterwards

to swim flatwise, unlike other fish, because one side of its face had no

eye. How Ina then caused a protuberance on the forehead of all sharks,

known to this day as Ina’s bump, by cracking a cocoa-nut she wished to

drink out of on the forehead of a shark that bore her, how the shark then

left her, and how she finally reached the Sacred Isle on the back of the

king of sharks, and became the wife of Timirau, the king of all fish, may

be read in further detail in Mr. Gill’s interesting collection of Myths

and Songs from the South Pacific.[368]

The necessity for a reason for everything, exemplified in these

traditions, exercises its influence on mythology itself, reasons being

invented for inexplicable customs or beliefs just as they are for strange

phenomena in nature. The custom, for instance, of hunting a wren to death

once a year, which has been observed in Ireland, the isle of Man, and

the South of France, has for its general explanation a belief that the

wren is a fairy who, after having decoyed many men to meet their deaths

in the sea, took the form of a wren to escape the plot laid for her by

a certain knight-errant. But the Irish have found quite another reason

for the custom, having invented the story, that on the eve of the battle

of the Boyne the Irish had stolen up to King William’s sleeping camp and

were on the point of putting an end to the heretics, when a wren hopped

upon the drum of a Protestant drummer, and by thus waking him caused

their defeat; a defeat which they avenge on every anniversary of the day

by the persecution of that unhappy bird.[369]

The story of the wren is well known; how, when the birds were competing

for the kingship by the test of the greatest height attained in flying,

the wren hid in the eagle’s feathers, and, when the eagle had flown

far beyond the other birds, darted himself yet a little above it. It

is said that the first appearance of this story is in a collection of

beast-fables, composed by a rabbi in the 13th century.[370] But the

resemblance between the wren-story as it is told in Germany or Ireland,

and a story of a linnet as told by the Odjibwas of North America, is so

striking a testimony of the way in which closely similar tales are framed

independently, that the two stories are worth comparing.

_THE ODJIBWA STORY._

‘The birds met together one day to try which could fly the

highest. Some flew up very swift, but soon got tired, and were

passed by others of stronger wing. But the eagle went up beyond

them all, and was ready to claim the victory, when the grey

linnet, a very small bird, flew from the eagle’s back, where

it had perched unperceived, and being fresh and unexhausted,

succeeded in going the highest. When the birds came down and

met in council to award the prize, it was given to the eagle,

because that bird had not only gone up nearer to the sun than

any of the larger birds, but it had carried the linnet on its

back.’

For this reason the eagle’s feathers became the most honourable

marks of distinction a man could bear.[371]

_THE IRISH STORY._

‘The birds all met together one day, and settled among

themselves that whichever of them could fly highest was to be

the king of all. Well, just as they were on the hinges of being

off, what does the little rogue of a wren do, but hop up and

perch himself unbeknown on the eagle’s tail. So they flew and

flew ever so high, till the eagle was miles above all the rest,

and could not fly another stroke, he was so tired. “Then,”

says he, “I’m king of the birds....” “You lie,” says the wren,

darting up a perch and a half above the big fellow. Well, the

eagle was so mad to think how he was done, that when the wren

was coming down, he gave him a stroke of his wing, and from

that day to this the wren was never able to fly further than a

hawthorn bush.’[372]

It is impossible to assign limits either to the vitality or to the

range of a story. If the commerce which has ever prevailed between the

different tribes of the world, as it prevails to this day, either by

conquest or by barter, has caused so wide a dispersion of the races and

products of the earth, the wonder would rather be if the products of

men’s thoughts and fancies had not prevailed so widely, had not taken so

deep root in man’s memory, seeing that they cost nothing either to carry

or to keep. For many stories therefore of wide range, agreeing in such

minute particulars as to render difficult the theory of their independent

origin, the mystery of their resemblance is amply solved by the theory of

their gradual dispersion, without their proving anything as to the common

origin of those who tell them. The story, for instance, of Faithful

John, the central idea of which is, that a friend can only apprise

some one of a danger he will incur on his wedding night, by himself

incurring suspicion and being turned into stone, is told with little

variation in Bohemia, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and the discovery of the

leading thought in a story in India makes it possible that it was there

originated.[373] In Polynesia, again, the story of stopping the motion

of the sun is widely spread; in New Zealand, Maui makes ropes of flax,

goes with his brothers to the point where the sun rises, hides from it by

day, and when it rises next day succeeds in his purpose before letting

it go further. In Tahiti, Maui is a priest, or chief of olden time, who

builds a marae which must be finished by the evening, and who therefore

seizes the sun by its rays and binds him to a tree till his work is

finished. In Hawaii Maui stops the sun till evening, because his wife has

to finish a certain dress by twilight. In Samoa, Maui appears as Itu, a

man who is anxious to build a house of great stones, but is unable to do

so because the sun goes too fast; he therefore takes a boat and lays nets

in the sun’s path, but as these are broken through, he makes a noose,

catches the sun, and only lets it free when his house is finished.[374]

Obviously, these stories are all related, but it is impossible to say

whether they spread from any one place to the others, or whether they

are remnants, retained in altered form, from the primitive mythology

of a common Polynesian home. It is, however, worthy of notice that in

Wallachian fairy lore also a cow pushes back the sun to the hour of

mid-day, to enable a youth who had fallen asleep to accomplish his

task,[375] and that the idea of catching the sun is not unknown to the

mythology of America.

There is, however, a large class of stories which arise independently,

and owe their remarkable family likeness neither to a common descent nor

to importation, but to the natural promptings of the imagination. Thus,

the idea of a tree so high that it reaches the heavens, and consequently

of the heavens as thereby attainable, naturally produces such a story as

Jack and the Beanstalk, a story which is said to be found all over the

world, but the versions of which agree in no other single point than in

the admission to the sky by dint of climbing.[376] In the same way many

of the ideas common to the Indo-European nations, and so often explained

as originally derived from the fanciful meteorology of the primitive

Aryans, find startling analogues outside the Aryan family, where there

is no reason to suppose them anything more than the direct offspring of

the dreamer or the story-teller. If the constancy of Penelope to Ulysses,

tormented by her suitors, is simply that of the evening light, assailed

by the powers of darkness, till the return of her husband the sun in the

morning,[377] shall we apply the same interpretation to the story of the

wife of the Red Swan, of the Odjibwas, who, when he returns from the

discovery of his magic arrows from the abode of the departed spirits,

finds that his two brothers have been quarrelling for the possession of

his wife, but been quarrelling in vain?[378] If the legend of Cadmus

recovering Europa, after she has been carried away by the white bull, the

spotless cloud, means that ‘the sun must journey westward until he sees

again the beautiful tints which greeted his eyes in the morning,’[379]

shall we say the same of a story current in North America, to the effect

that a man once had a beautiful daughter whom he forbade to leave the

lodge lest she should be carried off by the king of the buffaloes; and

that as she sat, notwithstanding, outside the house, combing her hair,

‘all of a sudden the king of the buffaloes came dashing on, with his herd

of followers, and taking her between his horns, away he cantered over

plains, plunged into a river which bounded his land, and carried her

safely to his lodge on the other side,’ whence she was finally recovered

by her father?[380]

Again, in Hindu mythology, Urvasi came down from heaven and became the

wife of the son of Budha, only on condition that two pet rams should

never be taken from her bedside and that she should never behold her

lord undressed. The immortals, however, wishing Urvasi back in heaven,

contrived to steal the rams; and as the king pursued the robbers with

his sword in the dark, the lightning revealed his person, the compact

was broken, and Urvasi disappeared.[381] This same story is found in

different forms among many people of Aryan and Turanian descent, the

central idea being that of a man marrying someone of aerial or aquatic

origin, and living happily with her till he breaks the condition on which

her residence with him depends. Thus there is the story of Raymond

of Toulouse, who chances in the hunt upon the beautiful Melusina at a

fountain and lives with her happily till he discovers her fish-nature and

she vanishes; but exactly parallel stories come no less from Borneo, the

Celebes, or North America than from Ireland or Germany; for which reason

it seems sufficient to receive them simply as they stand, as fairy tales

natural to every tribe of mankind that has a fixed belief in supernatural

beings, rather than to explain these wonderful wives as the ‘bright

fleecy clouds of early morning, which vanish as the splendour of the sun

is unveiled.’[382] Let us compare the story as it is told in America and

Bornoese tradition.

_THE BORNOESE STORY._

A certain Bornoese, when far from home, once climbed a tree to

rest, and whilst there ‘was attracted by the most ravishing

music, which ever and anon came nearer and nearer, until it

seemingly approached the very roots of the tree, when a pure

well of water burst out, at the bottom of which were seven

beautiful virgins. Ravished at the sight, and determined to

make one of them his son’s wife, he made a lasso of his rattan,

and drew her up.’ One day, however, her husband hit her in

anger, and she was taken up to the sky.[383]

_THE AMERICAN STORY._

Wampee, a great hunter, once came to a strange prairie, where

he heard faint sounds of music, and looking up saw a speck in

the sky, which proved itself to be a basket containing twelve

most beautiful maidens, who, on reaching the earth, forthwith

set themselves to dance. He tried to catch the youngest, but

in vain; ultimately he succeeded by assuming the disguise of a

mouse. He was very attentive to his new wife, who was really a

daughter of one of the stars, but she wished to return home, so

she made a wicker basket secretly, and by help of a charm she

remembered, ascended to her father.[384]

It has been imagined that all the fairy tales of the world may be reduced

to certain fundamental story roots; but these story roots we should look

for not in the clouds, but upon the earth, not in the various aspects of

nature, but in the daily occurrences and surroundings of savage life. The

uniformity which appears in so many of the myths or fairy tales of the

world would thus simply arise from a uniformity of the experiences of

existence. The evidence concerning savage astro-mythology is conclusive,

that nothing is conceived of the heavenly bodies that has not its

prototype on earth; that the skies do but mirror the events or objects

of earth, where the memorable incidents of the chase or the battle are

told of the stars: nor is it strange if in a few years such tales should

have so gained in the telling, that it is often impossible to separate

the fact from the fiction, or to distinguish a crude supposition from the

creation of a fanciful myth.

For although it is difficult to lay down the boundaries between the

language of metaphor and the language of fact, inasmuch as what is faith

to one man is often but fancy to another, there is reason to believe

that savages really do very often confuse celestial with terrestrial

phenomena, that, for instance, the Zulus, when they speak of the stars as

the children of the sky and of the sun as their father, are expressing

rather a real belief than a poetical fancy, and that the conception

of the sun and moon as physically related is an actual belief quite

as much as a merely figurative explanation. If this be true, a large

part of mythology must be regarded not as a poetical explanation of

things, suggested by the grammatical form of words or by roots that lend

similar names to the most diverse conceptions, but as the direct effect

of primitive thought in its application to the phenomena of nature. It

is more likely that the early thoughts of men should have framed their

language than that the form of their language should have preceded

their form of thought. And if it be shown (by those who hold that the

personification of impersonal things is consequent on the grammatical

structure of a language) that the Kafirs and other tribes of South

Africa, whose language does not denote sex, are almost destitute of

myths and fables, whilst tribes who employ a sex-denoting language have

many,[385] it is noticeable that such personification has been shown to

exist among the natives of Australia, between the different dialects of

whose language it is said to have been one of the points of resemblance,

that they recognised no distinctions of gender.[386]

A story of the Ottawa Indians (by internal evidence posterior in date

to their acquaintance with guns and ships) may be taken as a sample of

savage traditions, which prove that the convertibility of mankind with

sun, moon, or stars, is as natural a belief to a savage, as that his

next-door neighbour may turn at pleasure into a wolf or a snake. Six

young men finding themselves on a hill-top in close proximity to the

sun, resolved to travel to it. Two of them finally reached a beautiful

plain, lighted by the moon, which, as they advanced, appeared as an aged

woman with a white face, who spoke to them and promised to conduct them

to her brother, then absent on his daily course through the sky. This

woman ‘they knew from her first appearance’ to be the moon. When she

introduced them to her brother, ‘the sun motioned them with his hand to

follow him,’ and they accompanied him with some difficulty till they were

restored safe and sound to the earth.[387] So Sir G. Grey, collecting

native legends concerning a cave in Australia, found that the only point

of agreement was ‘that originally _the moon who was a man_ had lived

there.’[388]

But, except on the assumption that savages are idiots, it is impossible

that such legends should not only obtain currency, but enjoy the vitality

of traditions, unless they conform to certain canons of belief, unless

they contain nothing inherently incredible. A fairy tale pleases a child,

not because it is known to be impossible, but because it carries the

mind further afield than actual experience does into the realms of the

possible; and a tale understood to be impossible would be as insipid to

a savage as it would be to a child. Schoolcraft, in reference to Indian

popular tales, speaks of the ‘belief of the narrators and listeners

in every wild and improbable thing told;’ and says, ‘Nothing is too

capacious for Indian belief.’[389] If, as their stories abundantly show,

they feel no difficulty in conceiving the instantaneous transformation

of men not merely into something living, but into stones or stumps, the

fact ceases to be strange, that in Indian faith ‘many of the planets are

transformed adventurers.’[390] What, then, more natural than that all

over the world the deeds of great tribesmen should be transferred to the

skies, and, under the action of uniform laws of fancy, should in time

become so overgrown with fiction as to pass into the domain of the purest

mythology, till at last they appear as mere figurative expressions of the

daily life of nature, of the struggle between the day and the night, of

the dispersion of the clouds by the sun?

The condition of things which makes such conceptions of the heavens

the natural outcome of primitive speculation may perhaps, to a certain

extent, be recovered by observation of the laws conditioning the actually

existent thoughts of the savage world.

The first entrance into Wonderland lies through Dreamland. Schoolcraft’s

testimony that ‘a dream or a fact is alike potent in the Indian mind’

accords with much other evidence to the effect that, with savages, the

sensations of the sleeping or waking life are equally real or but vaguely

distinguished. A native of Zululand will leave his work and travel to his

home, perhaps a hundred miles away, to test the truth of a dream,[391]

and so great is the importance the Zulus attach to such monitions, that

‘he who dreams is the great man of the village;’ whilst the gift to them

of ‘_sight by night in dreams_’ is ascribed to their first ancestor,

the great Unkulunkulu.[392] But how far surpassing even the normal

experiences of sleep must be the dreams of men in the hunting or nomad

state, the law of whose lives is either a want or an excess of food!

What richer fund for story-material can be imagined than the dreams of a

savage, or what more likely to introduce him to the mysteries of romance

than recollections of those sudden transformations or those weird images,

which have haunted the repose of his slumbering hours? And into what

strange lands of beauty and plenty, into what secrets of the skies,

would not the flights of his sleep give him an insight! In all fairy

tales and all mythology a remarkable conformity to the deranged ideas

of sleep does thus occur; and especially do the stories of the lower

races, as for instance those of Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches,’ read

far more like the recollections of bad dreams than like the worn ideas

of a once pure religion, or of a poetical interpretation of nature. The

most beautiful of the Indian legends, that of the origin of Indian corn,

was in native tradition actually referred to a dream, and to a dream

purposely resorted to, to gain a clearer insight into the mysteries of

nature.[393] And as dreams do but deal with the incidents of the waking

life, exaggerating them and contorting them, but never passing beyond

them, may not the somewhat uniform incidents of savage life, whether of

hunting, fishing, fighting, or travelling, offer some explanation of that

general similarity, which is so conspicuous an element in the comparative

mythology or the fairy-lore of the world?

Then the fact that the dead reappear in dreams at that season of the

night in which also the stars are seen, would tend to confirm the

idea of some community of nature between the dead and the stars, such

community as is indeed not unfrequently found, as where the Aurora

Borealis or the Milky Way are identified with the souls of the departed.

So, too, a Californian tribe is mentioned as having believed that chiefs

and medicine-men became heavenly bodies after their death,[394] and even

Tasmanians could point to the stars they would go to at death.[395]

But there is another reason which would still further create a mental

confusion between the deeds of a mortal on earth and the motions of some

luminary in heaven, and that is the language of adulation, which, from

ascribing the possession of the sky to a chief, in order to gratify

him, becomes imperceptibly the language of belief. It is common for the

Zulus to say of a chief, ‘That man is the owner of heaven and everything

is his,’ and a native once expressed his gratitude to a missionary by

pointing to the heaven and saying, ‘Sir, the sun is yours.’ ‘It does

not suffice them to honour a great man unless they place the heaven

on his shoulders; they do not believe what they say, they merely wish

to ascribe all greatness to him.’ If when a chief goes to war the sky

becomes overcast, they say, ‘The heaven of the chief feels that the

chief is suffering.’ Nor was any chief known to deprecate the use of

such language; he ‘expected to have it said always that the heaven was

his.’[396]

Obviously, however, there is no fast line between the language of

flattery and the language of fact. From the Tahitians, who would speak of

their kings’ houses as the clouds of heaven, or the Kafirs of Ethiopia,

who called their kings lords of the sun and moon, it is easy to trace

the progress of thought which actually led the latter people to pray to

their kings for rain, fine weather, or the cessation of storms.[397]

The Zulus, like many other savages, think of the sky as at no great

distance from the earth, and thus as the roof of their king’s palace in

the same way that the earth is its floor. ‘Utshaka claimed to be king

of heaven as well as earth, and ordered the rain-doctors to be killed,

because in assuming power to control the weather they were interfering

with his royal prerogative.’[398] But if such confusion between royalty

and divinity can exist in the savage mind whilst the king is on earth,

how natural is it that a man, associated for so long in his lifetime

with power over the elements, should, after his removal from earth

and from sight, become still more mixed up with elemental forces, or

perhaps even localised in some point of space! The word Zulu actually

means the Heavens, and in Zululand King of the Zulus means king of the

heavens,[399] so that when the king is drawn in his waggon to the centre

of the kraal, it is not surprising that, among the other acclamations,

such as ‘Lion, King of the World,’ with which his creeping subjects

salute him, they should actually salute him as Zulu, Heaven.[400] It can

only be from the use of such language that among the Zulus ‘rain, storm,

sunshine, earthquakes, and all else which we ascribe to natural causes

are brought about or retarded by _various people_ to whom this power is

ascribed. Every rain that comes is spoken of as belonging to somebody,

and in a drought they say that the owners of rain are at variance among

themselves.’[401]

That in aftertime, from these modes of thinking and speaking, the

attributes of a Zulu or Tahitian chief might become those of a

heaven-supporter, such as Atlas, or of a cloud-gatherer, such as Zeus, or

that, according as his body was consigned to the earth or the sea, such a

chief might become the earth-shaker or the ocean-ruler, is not only what

might be expected _à priori_, but what is to some extent justified by

facts. In South Africa the word which the missionaries have adopted for

both Hottentots and Kafirs as the name for the Deity, from its being the

nearest approach to the Christian conception, is believed to be derived

from two words signifying Wounded Knee, a term applied generations back

to a Hottentot sorcerer of great fame and skill, who happened to have

sustained some injury to his knees. ‘Having been held in high repute for

extraordinary powers during life, he (Utixo) continued to be invoked

even after death as one who could still relieve and protect; and hence

in process of time he became nearest to their first conceptions of

God.’[402] And the legend of Mannan Mac Lear, mythical first inhabitant

and first legislator of the Isle of Man, discloses a germ of similar

origin underlying the myth of a culture-hero, as his story preserved in

the following lines will show:

‘This merchant Manxman of the solemn smile,

First legislator of our rock-throned isle,

Dwelt in a fort (withdrawn from vulgar sight),

Cloud-capped Baroole, upon thy lofty height.

From New Year tide round to the Ides of Yule,

Nature submitted to his wizard rule.

Her secret force he could with charms compel

To brew a storm or raging tempests quell;

Make one man seem like twenty in a fray,

And drive the stranger (_i.e._ Scotch invaders) over seas away.’[403]

In other words, he was a great sorcerer and a great warrior, whose deeds

lived after him in story, and whose name lent itself as a nucleus, like

that of Charlemagne or of Alfred, for every adventure that was strange,

for every imagination that was wonderful.

There seems, indeed, no reason to seek for any higher genesis than this

for any of the culture-heroes of any mythology, notwithstanding that they

have with so much unanimity been forced into identification with the sun.

Zeus himself means but the same thing as Zulu, namely, the Sky or Heaven,

so that it is only natural that nothing that could be told of the sky

‘was not in some form or other ascribed to Zeus,’[404] just as we see

that modern Zulus ascribe to their chiefs all atmospheric phenomena, and

actually confer on them the appellation, Zulu. There is indeed nothing

in which Zeus differs essentially from Manabozho of North American

mythology, from Krishna of the Hindus, from Maui of the Polynesians, from

Quawteaht of the rude Ahts, or from Kutka of the still ruder Kamschadals.

The stories told of one may be more refined than those told of another,

but in no case are these divinities more than names, which serve as

convenient centres for the grouping of memorable feats or fictions.

Such names serve also, when once men have begun to reflect on the arts

or customs of their lives, as sufficient explanations of their origin;

and just as we find the institution of marriage attributed in China, or

Greece, or India to some mythical hero, so we find the discovery of fire

and light, or the invention of remarkable arts, duly ascribed to some

hypothetical originator. In Polynesian mythology, Maui, in Thlinkeet

Indian mythology, Yehl, played the part of Prometheus in procuring fire

for the use of men. From seeing a spider make its web, Manabozho invented

the art of making fishing nets; and Kutka (who, like Manabozho, is also

in some sense the maker of all things) taught the Kamschadals how to

build huts, how to catch birds, and beasts, and fish.[405] The supreme

deity of Finnish mythology not only brought fire for men from heaven but

was the inventor of music; yet like the other gods he was but a magician,

able to destroy the world at pleasure, to hold the sun captive in a box,

to conquer all monsters and heal all diseases.[406]

American mythology abounds in culture-heroes, mythical personages who

taught men useful arts and laws, and left, in the reverence attached to

their memory, a quasi-religious system for their posterity.[407] These

too have been resolved into observation of the phenomena of the sun or

the dawn. Manabozho or Michabo, the ancestor of the Algonquins, whose

name literally means the Great Hare, and conferred peculiar respect on

the clan who bore it as their totem, means in reality (according to this

theory) the Great Light, the Spirit of Dawn, or under another aspect

the North-west Wind; the confusion between the hare and the dawn being

supposed to have arisen from a root _wab_, which gave two words, one

meaning _white_ and the other _hare_, so that what was originally told

of the White Light came to be told of a Hare, and what was at first but

a personification of natural phenomena became a tissue of inconsistent

absurdities.[408] Ingenious, however, as such a solution undoubtedly is,

it is easier to believe that the stories of the Great Hare have grown

round a man, called, in complete accordance with American custom, after

the hare, and once a famous sorcerer or warrior like Mannan Mac Lear;

for in all the more recent traditions of him, there is much more of the

magician or shaman than of the wind or the dawn. He turns at will into a

wolf or an oak stump, he converses with all creation, he outwits serpents

by his cunning, he has a lodge from which he utters oracles; as brother

of the winds, by reason of his swiftness, there is no incongruity in

the idea that since his death he is the director of storms, and resides

in the region of his brother, the North Wind. It is curious that he

is swallowed up by the king of the fish, in this resembling in Aryan

mythology Pradyumna, the son of Vishnu, who after being swallowed by a

fish is ultimately restored to life,[409] or in Polynesian mythology

Maui, who is rescued by the sky from the embrace of the jelly fish. Maui,

like Tell, Sigurd, Hercules, and others, has recently been discovered

to be the sun, the fish which swallows him signifying really the earth;

for does not the earth swallow the sun every night, and is not the sun

only freed by the eastern sky in the morning?[410] Doubtless, on such a

reading of his life, Manabozho has as just a claim as Mani to a place in

the solar system; but then—who that has ever lived and died but has the

same?

Samé, the great name of Brazilian legend, came across the ocean from

the rising sun; he had power over the elements and tempests; the trees

of the forests would recede to make room for him, the animals used to

crouch before him; lakes and rivers became solid for him; and he taught

the use of agriculture and magic. Like him, Bochica, the great lawgiver

of the Muyscas and son of the sun, he who invented for them their

calendar and regulated their festivals, had a white beard, a detail in

which all the American culture-heroes agree.[411] It is not, however,

on this particular feature, so much as on their _whiteness_ in general

that stress has been laid to identify them with the great White Light of

Dawn. Of the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, Dr. Brinton says, ‘Like all the dawn

heroes he, too, was represented of white complexion, clothed in long

white robes.’ The white is the emphatic thing about them. So the name

Viracocha of the Peruvians, translated by Oviedo, ‘the foam of the sea,’

is, we are to believe, a metaphor: ‘the dawn rises above the horizon as

the snowy foam on the surface of the lake.’[412] But Peruvian tradition

was confused as to whether Viracocha was the highest god and creator of

the world, or only the first Inca; and such confusion between humanity

and divinity, which is everywhere the normal result of the deification of

the dead, is at least a more natural account of the origin of his worship

than a fancied resemblance between the sea-foam and the dawn.[413] Heitsi

Eibip, whom the Namaqua Hottentots call their Great Father, and on whose

graves they throw stones for luck, so far resembles a solar hero that

he is believed to have come like Samé from the East; yet, though much

that is wonderful already attaches to his memory, he has not yet thrown

off his human personality, but is known to have been merely a sorcerer

of great fame;[414] so that in his deification we have almost living

evidence of the process here assumed to have operated widely in the

formation of the world’s mythology.

To the influence of the language of adulation in the formation of

mythology, may also be added that of the language of affection or of

ridicule. Nicknames, taken at hazard from the animal world, or from any

object of earth, air, or water, would be obvious sources of improbable

stories, tending to the completest confusion between the doings of a

man and the attributes of the thing after which he was named. Nicknames

of affection would produce the same result; and if, as is likely,

other people besides the Finns call their daughters Moon, Sunshine, or

Water-glimmer, it is easy to see how, for instance, the departure of

Sunshine as a bride might come afterwards to be explained as a myth of

the dawn or of twilight, and in the same way anything else that happened

to her.[415]

An elemental explanation has been applied with such uniform effect,

first to Aryan and then to Polynesian and American mythology, that in

the resort to a more natural, albeit less poetical hypothesis, there may

be danger of carrying opposing theories too far. There are, however,

certain obvious limits; nor, if we doubt whether man in a primitive state

really had the poetical views of nature so generally claimed for him,

need we deny to him all poetical origination in the construction of his

mythology. Take, for instance, this typical Aryan passage, ‘By the early

Aryan mind the howling wind was conceived as a great dog or wolf. As the

fearful beast was heard speeding by the windows or over the house-top,

the inmates trembled, for none knew but his own soul might forthwith be

required of him. Hence to this day, among ignorant people, the howling

of a dog is supposed to portend a death in the family.’[416] When we

find that a dog’s howling portends the death of its master among the

Nubians,[417] and is regarded as a dreaded omen by the Kamschadals,[418]

as well as by the Fijians,[419] and that the Esquimaux lay a dog’s head

by the grave of a child to show it the way to the land of souls, we may

safely reject the Aryan pedigree of the superstition, nor go any farther

for its explanation than the nature of the sound itself. But though

Aryan mythology may be taken to have grown, like any other, round human

personalities, and though popular superstitions are in many instances

the primary products of the laws of psychology, ranking rather among

the sources than the _débris_ of mythology, there is proof from the

fairy-lore of savages that some of them have so far advanced in thought

as to be not incapable of personifying abstract ideas. Dr. Rink alludes

to the tendency of the Esquimaux to give figurative explanations of

things, to personify, for instance, human qualities, just as they are

personified in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’[420] The Chippewya Indians

personified sleep as Weeng, a giant insect that was once seen on a tree

in a wood, where it made a murmuring sound with its wings; and it was

generally conceived to cause sleep by sending a number of little fairies

to beat drowsy foreheads with their tiny clubs.[421] And the Odjibwas,

with a fancy which has been so poetically preserved by Longfellow,

identified Winter with an old hoary-headed man called Peboan, Spring with

a young man of quick step and rosy face called Segwun.[422]

The testimony, therefore, afforded by the observation of modern savage

races as to the growth of mythology discloses several ways in which,

as it is being formed now, we may infer that it was formed thousands

of years ago. The evidence of Steller that the Kamschadals explained

everything to themselves according to the liveliness of their fancy,

letting nothing escape their examination,[423] accords with evidence

concerning other races to the effect that some intellectual curiosity

enters as a constituent into the lowest human intelligence, giving birth

to explanations which are as absurd to us as they are natural to their

original framers. A ready capacity for invention is no rare trait of the

savage character. Sir G. Grey found that the capability of Australian

natives to invent marvels and wonders was proportioned to the quantity

of food he offered them, and that rather than confess ignorance of a

thing they would _invent_ a tradition;[424] whilst in the fondness of the

Koranna Hottentots, as they sit round their evening fires, of relating

fictitious adventures, lies a source of legendary lore which is not

likely to be limited to South Africa, and is probably aided elsewhere as

it is there by the knowledge, common to so many savage tribes, of the

preparation of intoxicating drinks.[425] If to these sources of mythology

be added the help supplied by dreams to the elaboration of fiction; the

misconceptions effected in traditions by the language of flattery, of

affection, or of ridicule; and, lastly, the tendency, probably consequent

on such confusion, to personify things or even abstract ideas; the wonder

will no longer be that the mythology of the different races of the world

displays so much uniformity, but that uniformity within limited ranges

should ever have been taken as a proof of a common ethnological origin.