nisation developed into the system as we find it,
it is a little difficult to see how selection can have operated, unless,
indeed, as Mr Lang suggests, the phratries are _transformed_ connubial
groups, in which case they may have received new names. It is perhaps
simpler to suppose that the cases of selection of phratry names cited
above are those in which the organisation has been borrowed with full
knowledge of its meaning. If this view is correct, no criticism of
theories of the origin of phratries is possible from the point of view
of the names actually existing, for we cannot say which, if any, are
those which were evolved in the organisation which served as a model to
the remainder.

Broadly speaking the theories of origin at present in the field may be
reduced to two: in the first place, the conscious reformation theory,
which supposes that man discovered the evils of in-and-in breeding, a
point on which some discussion will be found in a later portion of this
work. In the second place, there is the unconscious evolution theory put
forward by Mr Lang, whose criticism of the opposing view makes it
unnecessary to deal with the objections here[107].

Mr Lang's original theory took for its basis the hypothesis, put forward
by the late Mr J.J. Atkinson, in _Primal Law_, of the origin of
exogamy. His starting-point was mankind in the brute stage. At the point
in the evolution of the human race at which Mr Atkinson takes up his
tale, man, or rather Eoanthropos, was, according to his conjecture,
organised, if that term can be applied to the grouping of the lower
animals, in bodies consisting of one adult male, an attendant horde of
adult females, including, probably, at any rate after a certain lapse of
time, his own progeny, together with the immature offspring of both
sexes. As the young males came to maturity, they would be expelled from
the herd, as is actually the case with cattle and other mammals, by
their sire, now become their foe. They probably wandered about, as do
the young males of some existing species, in droves of a dozen or more,
and at certain seasons of the year, one or more of them would, as they
felt their powers mature, engage the lord of their own or of another
herd in single combat, until with the lapse of time the latter either
succumbed or was driven from the herd to end his days in solitary
ferocity, his hand against everyone, just as we see the rogue elephant
wage war indiscriminately on all