ace for the beginning of
this custom of trading babies, for that is what it often amounted
to--friends exchanging offspring as they might canoes.

It is said that the powerful sentiment among historical nations
opposing marriage between brother and sister and other close kindred
originated in the desire to make such connections odious, to preserve
virtue and decency among those in hourly intimacy. Monarchs and
nations long refused to bend to it. The Ptolemies and Pharaohs
married incestuously; Cleopatra, her brother. The Ptolemies married
their daughters, as did Artaxerxes, who wedded Atossa. The Ballinese
married twins of different sex. Abraham married his half-sister
by the same father. Moses's father married his aunt. Jacob took
to wife two sisters, his own cousins. In Great Russia until this
century a father married his son to a young woman, and then claimed
her as his concubine. When a son grew up, he followed his father's
example, though his wife was old and with many children. The Tamils
of southeast India, the Malaialais of the Kollimallais hills, have the
same custom. Inbreeding maintains a fineness of breed, but at the cost
of its vigor. That inbreeding is harmful is fairly certain. Examples
to the contrary are numerous in human and animal life. More than nine
hundred residents of Norfolk Island are descendants of the mutineers of
the British ship Bounty. They were begat by eight of the mutineers, and
intermarried for a century. They show no deterioration from this cause.

Hardly any crime is more loathed than incest, but the abomination grew
slowly as man progressed. Such ties have been abhorrent for long in
most countries. A belief that incestuous children were weak mentally
or physically came much later in the ages. The Polynesians must have
remarked that inbreeding accentuated the faults in a strain, making
for an accumulation of them. This would be a very far advance in human
observation; but the Polynesian, by experience, or knowledge brought
from his old Asiatic home, must have held such a theory, and sought
in the system of adoption, and in not bringing up consanguineous
children together, to ward off such misfortune. This at least is a
plausible reason for such an unnatural practice among a people so
unquestionably child-lovers.

The Marquesans had no totemism to save them. There were no exogamous
taboos. The tribe or clan was the chief unit, not the family. The
phratry tie was stronger than that o