The History of Human Marriage

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XVIII ENDOGAMY Sexual selection is influenced not only by preferences but by aversions. The latter have, in fact, played a much more conspicuous part in marriage regarded as a social institution than the former, because they have led to avoidances enforced by custom or law, whereas no society has...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XVIII ENDOGAMY Sexual selection is influenced not only by preferences but by aversions. The latter have, in fact, played a much more conspicuous part in marriage regarded as a social institution than the former, because they have led to avoidances enforced by custom or law, whereas no society has yet laid down any compulsory rules relating to the choice of partner which are based on the stimulating effect of beauty or on individual affection. There are endogamous rules, which forbid the members of a particular group to marry any one who is not a member of the group, and exogamous rules, which forbid the member of a particular group to marry any one who is a member of the group. These two sets of rules are by no means contradictory, in so far as they refer to different groups. Hence endogamy and exogamy occur side by side with each other among the same people. Indeed there is everywhere an outer circle?to use Sir Henry Maine's convenient expression?out of which marriage is either definitely prohibited or considered improper, and an inner circle within which no marriage is allowed. The most comprehensive endogamous group is the human species itself. The prohibition of sexual relations outside the species springs from a powerful instinct which man shares with the lower animals. L'animal, says M. Duvernoy, a l'instinct de se rapprocher de son espece'et de s'6loigner des autres, comme il a celui de choisir ses aliments et d'eViter les poisons.1 There are hybrids even 1 Duvernoy, ' Propagation, ' in Dictionnaire univers'l d'histoirz nature lie, x. 546. among wild species living in a state of nature, especially birds belonging to the order of Gallinae,1 but they are rare; and their scarcity must be partly due to the aversion of animals to sexual connections w...