affair. From what we know of
the ideas and practices of uncivilized tribes all over the world, it is
evident that the sacredness of the family based upon indissoluble
marriage is a thing of comparatively modern growth. If the sexual
relations of the Australians, as observed to-day,[63] are an improvement
upon an antecedent state of things, that antecedent state must have been
sheer promiscuity. There is ample warrant for supposing, with Mr.
McLennan, that at the beginning of the lower status of savagery, long
since everywhere extinct, the family had not made itself distinctly
visible, but men lived in a horde very much like gregarious brutes.[64]
I have shown that the essential difference between this primeval human
horde and a mere herd of brutes consisted in the fact that the gradual
but very great prolongation of infancy had produced two effects: the
lengthening of the care of children tended to differentiate the horde
into family-groups, and the lengthening of the period of youthful mental
plasticity made it more possible for a new generation to improve upon
the ideas and customs of its predecessors.[65] In these two concomitant
processes--the development of the family and the increase of mental
plasticity, or ability to adopt new methods and strike out into new
paths of thought--lies the whole explanation of the moral and
intellectual superiority of men over dumb animals. But in each case the
change was very gradual.[66] The true savage is only a little less
unteachable than the beasts of the field. The savage family is at first
barely discernible amid the primitive social chaos in which it had its
origin. Along with polyandry and polygyny in various degrees and forms,
instances of exclusive pairing, of at least a temporary character, are
to be found among the lowest existing savages, and there are reasons for
supposing that such may have been the case even in primeval times. But
it was impossible for strict monogamy to flourish in the ruder stages of
social development; and the kind of family-group that was first clearly
and permanently differentiated from the primeval horde was not at all
like what civilized people would recognize as a family. It was the
_gens_ or _clan_, as we find it exemplified in all stages from the
middle period of savagery to the middle period of barbarism. The _gens_
or _clan_ was simply--to define it by a third synonym--the _kin_; it was
originally a group of males and females who were tra