an evolution, the complexity and coherence
of the social order follow upon the size of the group; which, since
its size, in turn, follows upon the mode of the economic life, may
be described as the food-group.

Besides food, however, there is a second elemental condition which
vitally affects the human race; and that is sex. Social organization
thus comes to have a twofold aspect. On the one hand, and perhaps
primarily, it is an organization of the food-quest. On the other hand,
hardly less fundamentally, it is an organization of marriage. In what
follows, the two aspects will be considered more or less together,
as to a large extent they overlap. Primitive men, like other social
animals, hang together naturally in the hunting pack, and no less
naturally in the family; and at a very rudimentary stage of evolution
there probably is very little distinction between the two. When,
however, for some reason or other which anthropologists have still
to discover, man takes to the institution of exogamy, the law of
marrying-out, which forces men and women to unite who are members of
more or less distinct food-groups, then, as we shall presently see,
the matrimonial aspect of social organization tends to overshadow the
politico-economic; if only because the latter can usually take care
of itself, whereas to marry a perfect stranger is an embarrassing
operation that might be expected to require a certain amount of
arrangement on both sides.

* * * * *

To illustrate the pre-exogamic stage of human society is not so easy
as it may seem; for, though it is possible to find examples, especially
amongst Negritos such as the Andamanese or Bushmen, of peoples of the
rudest culture, and living in very small communities, who apparently
know neither exogamy nor what so often accompanies it, namely, totemism,
we can never be certain whether we are dealing in such a case with
the genuinely primitive, or merely with the degenerate. For instance,
the chapter on the forms of social organization in Professor Hobhouse's
_Morals in Evolution_ starts off with an account of the system in vogue
amongst the Veddas of the Ceylon jungle, his description being founded
on the excellent observations of the brothers Sarasin. Now it is
perfectly true that some of the Veddas appear to afford a perfect
instance of what is sometimes called "the natural family." A tract
of a few miles square forms the beat of a small group of fam