s wedding, and the king rewards him with fifty gold
pieces.[15] In Further India, and on several islands of the great ocean,
it is sometimes the priests and sometimes the tribal chiefs who
undertake the function.[16] The same happens in Senegambia, where the
tribal chief exercises, as a duty of his office, the deflowering of
maids, and receives therefor a present. Again, with other peoples, the
custom was, and continues here and yonder, that the deflowering of a
maid, sometimes even of a child only a few months old, is done by means
of images of deities, fashioned expressly for this purpose. It may also
be accepted as certain that the "jus primae noctis" (the right of the
first night), prevalent in Germany and all Europe until late in the
Middle Ages, owes its origin to the same tradition, as Frederick Engels
observes. The landlord, who, as master of his dependents and serfs,
looked upon himself as their chief, exercised the right of the head of
the tribe, a right that he considered had passed over to himself as the
arbiter of their lives and existence.

Echoes of the mother-right are further detected in the singular custom
among some South American tribes, that, instead of the lying-in woman,
the man goes to bed, there acts like a woman in labor, and is tended by
the wife. The custom implies that the father recognizes the new born
child as his own. By imitating the pains of child-birth, the man fills
the fiction that the birth is also his work; that he, therefore, has a
right to the child, who, according to the former custom, belonged to the
mother and the mother's gens, respectively. The custom is said to have
also maintained itself among the Basques, who must be looked upon as a
people of primitive usages and customs. Likewise is the custom said to
prevail among several mountain tribes in China. It prevailed until not
long since in Corsica.

In Greece likewise did woman become an article of purchase. So soon as
she stepped into the house of her marital lord, she ceased to exist for
her family. This was symbolically expressed by burning before the door
the handsomely decked wagon which took her to the house of her husband.
Among the Ostiaks of Siberia, to this day, the father sells his
daughter: he chaffers with the representative of the bridegroom about
the price to be paid. Likewise among several African tribes, the same as
in the days of Jacob, the custom is that a man who courts a maid, enters
in the service of h