Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

148 SYSTEM OF KINSHIP THROUGH MALES.

we may safely look upon it as the relic of an ancient barbarism.

As soon as the change was made, the father would take the place held previously by the mother, and he, instead of she, would be regarded as the parent. Hence, on the birth of a child, the father would naturally be very careful what he did, and what he ate, for fear the child be injured. Thus, I believe, arises the curious custom of the Couvade to which I referred in my first chapter.

Relationship to the father at first excludes that to the mother, and, from having been regarded as no relation to the former, children came to be looked on as none to the latter.

In some parts of South America, where it is customary to treat captives well in every respect for a certain time, giving them clothes, food, a wife, &c., and then to kill and eat them, any children they may have are killed and eaten also.1 As a general rule inheritance and relationship go together, but in some parts of Australia, while the old rule of tracing descent through the mother still exists, property is inherited in the male line, though it appears that the division is made during the father's life.

How completely the idea of relationship through the father, when once recognised, might replace that through the mother we may see in the very curious trial of Orestes. Agamemnon, having been murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, was avenged by their son Orestes, who killed his mother for the murder of his 1 Lafitau, vol. ii. p. 307.

2 Grey's Australia, vol. ii. p. 226, 236.

THE PRESENT SYSTEM.

149

father. For this act he was prosecuted before the tribunal of the gods by the Erinnyes, whose function it was to punish those who shed the blood of relatives. In his defence, Orestes asks them why they did not punish Clytemnestra for the murder of Agamemnon; and when they reply that marriage does not constitute blood relationship,-'She was not the kindred of the man whom she slew,' he pleads that by the same rule they cannot touch him, because a man is a relation to his father, but not to his mother. This view, which seems to us so unnatural, was supported by Apollo and Minerva, and being adopted by the majority of the gods, led to the acquittal of Orestes.

Hence we see that the views prevalent on relationship-views by which the whole social organisation is so profoundly affected-are by no means the same among different races, nor uniform at the same historical period. We ourselves still confuse affinity and consanguinity; but into this part of the question it is not my intention to enter: the evidence brought forward in the preceding pages is, however, I think sufficient to show that children were not in the earliest times regarded as related equally to their father and their mother, but that the natural progress of ideas is, first, that a child is related to his tribe generally; secondly, to his mother, and not to his father; thirdly, to his father, and not to his mother; lastly, and lastly only,

that he is related to both.

150

CHAPTER IV.

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELATIONSHIPS.

In the previous chapter I have discussed the question of marriage as it exists among the lower races of men, and the relation of children to their parents. In the present I propose to discuss the question of relationships in general, and to endeavour to trace up the ideas on this subject from their rudest form to the more advanced condition in which they exist amongst more civilised races.

For the facts on which this chapter is based we are mainly indebted to Mr. Morgan, who has collected a great mass of information on the subject, which has recently been published by the Smithsonian Institution. Though I dissent from Mr. Morgan's main conclusions, his work appears to me to be one of the most valuable contributions to ethnological science which has appeared for many years. It contains schedules, most of which are very complete, giving the systems of relationships of no less than 139 races or tribes; and we have, therefore (though there are still many lamentable deficiencies-the Siberians, South Americans, and true Negroes, being, for instance, as yet unrepresented), a great body

1 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, by L. H. Morgan, 1870.

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELATIONSHIPS. 151

of evidence illustrating the ideas on the subject of relationships which prevail among different races of men.

Our own system of relationships naturally follows from the marriage of single pairs; and it is, in its general nomenclature, so mere a description of the actual facts, that most persons tacitly regard it as necessarily general to the human race, with, of course, verbal and unimportant differences in detail. Hence but little information can be extracted from dictionaries and vocabularies. They generally, for instance, give words for uncle, aunt, and cousin; but an uncle may be either a father's brother or a mother's brother, and an aunt may be either a father's sister or a mother's sister; a first cousin, again, may be the child of any one of these four uncles and aunts; but practically, as we shall see, these cases are in many races distinguished from one another; and I may add, in passing, it is by no means clear that we are right in regarding them as identical and equivalent. Travellers have, on various occasions, noticed with surprise some special peculiarity of nomenclature which came under their notice; but Mr. Morgan was the first to collect complete schedules of relationships. The special points which have been observed have, indeed, been generally regarded as mere eccentricities; but this is evidently not the case, because the principle or principles to which they are due are consistently carried out, and the nomenclature is reciprocal generally, though not quite without exceptions. Thus, if the Mohawks call a father's brother, not an uncle, but a father, they not only call his son a brother and his

152

DIFFERENT SYSTEMS

grandson a son, but these descendants also use the correlative terms.

We must remember that our ideas of relationships are founded on our social system, and that, as other races have very different habits and ideas on this subject, it is natural to expect that their systems of relationship would also differ from ours. I have in the previous chapter pointed out that the ideas and customs with reference to marriage are very dissimilar in different races, and we may say, as a general rule, that, as we descend in the scale of civilisation, the family diminishes, and the tribe increases, in importance. Words have a profound influence over thought, and true family-names prevail principally among the highest races of men. Even in the less advanced portions of our own country, we know that collective names were those of the tribe, rather than the family.

I have already mentioned that among the Romans the 'family' was not a natural family in our sense of the term. It was founded,' not on marriage, but on power. The family of a chief consisted, not of those allied to him by blood, but of those over whom he exercised control. Hence, an emancipated son ceased to be one of the family, and did not, except by will, take any share in his father's property; on the other hand, the wife introduced into the family by marriage, or the stranger converted into a son by adoption, became regularly recognised members of the family, though no blood tie existed.

Marriage, again, in Rome, was symbolised by cap

1 See Ortolan's Justinian, p. 126, et seq.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »