It had long been known, from the researches of Sir George Grey and Mr. Gideon Scott Lang, that marriage laws like those of the Red Indians, the people of Ashantee, and many other backward races, prevailed among most tribes of the Austra lian blacks. They were divided into stocks, each of which was named after some animal or plant. No man might marry a woman who bore the same stock name and the same cognisance. A man of the Kangaroo stock might not marry a woman of the Kangaroo stock, but he might marry an Emu woman, or a Wombat woman, and so forth. Children took the stock name and cognisance of the mother. These cognisances are now usually called totems, from their Red Indian name.
Among the ancient Jews, Abraham married his half - sister, Nahor married his brother's daughter, and Amram his father's sister ; this was permitted because they were not regarded as relations. Tamar also evidently might baye married Amnon, thought they were both children' of David. Speak unto the king,' she said, for he will not withhold me from thee ; ' for as their mothers were not the same, they were no relations in the eye of the law.
Some of the Bedouin, also another Semite race,' unmistakeably follow the rite of marriage by capture ; and yet a man can claim to marry his cousin, if only he be willing to give the price demanded for her, and amongst the Muhammadans of Arab origin, in the Peninsula of India, to wed the maternal uncle's daughter is a recognised right.
The Koch'h and the Ho are forbidden to marry excepting within the tribe. But the latter are not thoroughly endogamous, for they are divided into keeli or clans, and may not take to wife a girl of their own keeli. Thus they are in fact exogamous.
The Toda race, according to Met; are divided into five distinct classes, known by the names Peiky, Pekkan, Kuttan, Kennae, and Tody ; of which the first is regarded as the most aristocratic. These classes do not intermarry with each other, and can therefore never lose their distinctive characteristics.
Amon°. the Yerkala of Southern India, the first two daughters of a family may be claimed by the maternal uncle as wives for his sons. With them the value of a wife is fixed at twenty pagodas. The maternal uncle's right to the first two daughters is valued at eight, out of twenty pagodas, and is carried out thus : if he urge his preferential claim, and marry his own sons to his nieces, he pays for each only twelve pagodas ; and similarly, if be, from not having sons or any other cause, forego his claim, he receives eight pagodas of the twenty paid to the girls' parents by anybody else who may marry them.
The Doingnak of the Arakan Hill tracts, a branch of the Clink-ma, appear to have been endogamous. Captain Lewin mentions that during the chiefship of Janbux Khan, about 1782, the chief passed an order that the Doingnak should intermarry with the tribe in general. This was contrary to ancient custom, and caused discontent and eventually a break in the tribe.
The Kalang of Java, who have some claim to be regarded the aborigines of the island, are endogamous, and when a man asks a girl in marriage he must prove descent from their peculiar stock.
The Manchu Tartar race forbid marriages be tween those whose family names are different. In Guam, brothers and sisters used to intermarry, and it is even stated that such unions were pre ferred as being most natural and proper.
. With the royal family of Burma, the custom is continued of half-brothers and half-sisters marry ing. The king's eldest daughter remains unmarried. The Siamese rulers also marry their half-sisters.
Endogamy would seem to have prevailed in the Sandwich Islands and in New Zealand, where, as Yate mentions, great oppOsition is made to any one taking, except for sorne\ political purpose, a wife from another tribe ; so \that such inter marriages seldom occur.' Polygamy.—The Hebrew Bible shows a pro gressive change in Jewish views on women: The elevated conception of marriage presented in the record of the creation, testifies to a most profound sense of the sacredness of monogamy as the most intimate possible union of two persons ; and the Canticle of later times is a song of wedded love and fidelity. Yet, at the outset, the right of woman to choose her lot seems to have been wholly disregarded, as Abraham twice permitted Pharaoh to have Sarah, Judah condemned his daughter-in-law to be burned ; a thousand years afterwards, God threatened to give David's wives to his neighbours or to his son ; Michal was transferred to Phalti from David by Saul, who had quarrelled with David ; and at that era kings of David's tribe habitually succeeded to their predecessors' wives. Polygamy was not pro hibited amongst the Hebrews, but there is nothing to warrant the terrible seraglio customs depicted in Judges, and instituted by David and Solomon as regal.