The problem has been to account for the world-wide
development of kinships, usually named after animals,
plants, and other objects, and for the rule that the
members of these kins may never marry within the
kinship as limited by the name, Crow, Wolf, or whatever
it may be. Why, again, are these kinships regimented,
in each tribe, into two " phratries," exogamous, which
also frequently bear animal names ? No system hitherto



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proposed seems satisfactory, for the reasons given in the
preceding critical chapters.
In trying to construct a more satisfactory system than
those which have been criticised, we must commence,
like others, with an hypothesis as to what kind of social
animal man was when he began his career. Now we
really are not quite reduced, to conjecture, for Mr.
Howitt's knowledge of savage life, in such a country
as Australia, proves that the economic conditions, the
search for supples, and the blunt inefEiciency of the
earliest weapons, instruments, and hunting methods
must have forced men to live in sirutU separate groups.
The members, again, of each group, being animated by
"individual likes and dislikes" (including love, hate,
jealousy, maternal affection, and the associations of
kindness between a male and those whom he provided
for and protected), must soon have evolved some dis-
crimination of persons, and certain practical restraints
on amatory intercourse. In groups necessarily very
small, these germinal elements of later morality could
be evolved, as they could not be evolved in the
gregarious communal horde of theory.
Even when m:an's ancestors were hardly men, Mr.
Darwin thus states his opinion as to their social
condition.
