Studies in Ancient History: The Second Series, comprising an Inquiry into the Origin of Exogamy. By the late John Ferguson M'Lennan. Edited by his Widow and Arthur Platt. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. 1896.
At last we have in their final form all that we shall ever have of the remaining studies of the late J. F. M'Lennan. For years anthropological students have been waiting for them; and now they receive them, only to find how fragmentary they are. Mr. M'Lennan, as everyone knows, was one of the first to investigate in a really scientific manner the early stages of human institutions. It is mainly to him, to the late Sir Henry Maine, and to Professor Tylor, that we owe the development of the psychological side of anthropology, which is so notable a feature of the last thirty years, and which is destined, if we mistake not, to effect so large a revolution in every branch of speculation concerned with man, his origin and destinies.
Our first thought, therefore, on looking at this volume, is one of regret that the author's life should not have been spared to work out more fully his theories and to fortify them against attacks, or to think out further the problems presented to him. For it must be admitted that, great as was the work that he accomplished, and large and fruitful as were his hypotheses, he seemed hardly to grasp the full force of the objections to their all-pervading value. His controversy with Mr. Lewis Morgan, for example, cannot be regarded as settled entirely in M'Lennan's favour. It is strange that he should have written with such asperity—such undeserved asperity—of Morgan. Seeing so clearly as he did the origin and meaning of symbolism as a survival of a previous reality, it is strange that he should never have been brought to see that the modes of address on which Morgan built so much were a symbolism like that of marriage by capture, a symbolism bespeaking an earlier state of society and a system of consanguinity, and not merely, as he contended, forms of savage politeness. His criticism, adopted and elaborated by his brother in an essay which concludes the volume, of Howitt's theory of the organization of the Kamilaroi and Kurnai, too, is powerful, and must give pause to students who have been accustomed to accept Mr. Howitt's fascinating work. Yet it cannot by any means be
