In most such communities the affection of children toward their mother is stronger than toward their father. Among the Hereros, a Caffir tribe in South-west Africa, the traveller Anderson states that the most solemn oath a native can take is to swear " by the tears of my mother;" and Mungo Park tells of a Mandingo boy who exclaimed, " Beat me if you wish, but do not scold my mother." Impressed by facts such as we have just related, some ethnologists have gone to the other extreme and brought forward the hypothesis that in ancient society woman was the stronger sex, that she held man in sub jection, and that only by a violent revolution could he escape from her bondage! We may pass this by as one of the vagaries of science, but it is worth mentioning, as it indicates how numerous are the evidences that the opinion of her constant subjection in primitive communities is unfounded.
The Grounds of Sexual Attraction.—The instinct which prompts to sexual selection and marriage is love. As an instinct it is quite marked in monogamous monkeys and birds, and in some of them it is permanent. In man it rises to the dignity of a sentiment—one that is frequently both enduring and powerful and demands the attention of the ethnologist.
What is the foundation of the attraction which leads the male to select one particular female rather than another, and which leads her, when free to act, to reciprocate in some instances and not in others, has not been explained. The laws of sexual selection laid down by the followers of Darwin as holding good in the lower species confessedly fail when applied to man. That such mutual attractions do exist, even in the rudest con ditions of society, cannot successfully be questioned. There are indeed some tribes of limited extent, and usually corrupted by proximity with other races, whose marriages seem inferior to the pairing of birds; but these are exceptions.
Terms of EndcarmenI. —The absence of terms of endearment and modes of caressing in certain languages and nations is not to be construed into meaning that the tribes entertain no sentiments corresponding- with these acts and expressions. Nations, like individuals, vary widely in their demonstrativeness, and their terms, moreover, may not be similar to those with which the observer is familiar. Nor is there any dearth of
terms of endearment in some of such tongues. The Nahuatl, spoken by the Aztecs and allied tribes of Mexico, is extraordinarily rich in expres sions of affection, as may be seen by looking in the appendix of Olmos' Grammar of that idiom. A recent Grammar of the Quichna language of Peru, that spoken by the Incas, traces out and assigns the shades of meaning to six hundred and seventy-five variations of the verb " to love." Several Negro dialects are mentioned as quite rich in similar terms.
of of caressing, like methods of salutation, are matters of local custom. Kissing, so familiar with us, was probably unknown throughout America before the discovery, as it certainly was in Australia, the South Sea Islands, New Zealand, and is still in most parts of Central Africa. An English traveller in the last-mentioned region relates that he was presented with a little slave-girl by one of the chiefs. To signify his feelings of kindness for her, he received her with a kiss, but it threw her into a spasm of terror. He learned afterward that such a mark of affection was unknown to her people, and that she had asso ciated it with the habit of the boa-constrictor to lick its prey before swal lowing it, and feared that her new protector was about to eat her! Suicide for evidence of the strength of the passion of love in the lower races is given by their readiness to destroy themselves when they cannot obtain the object of their hopes. Of all the aspersions which the fair Rosalind chose to cast upon the male sex, none was less true than that " men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love." Suicide, not unknown among the higher brutes, is frequent for comparatively trivial causes with some varieties of men, and unrequited love is a common motive. Perhaps more frequent are the suicides of females for this cause. Mrs. Eastman, in her description of life among the Sioux Indians, says that rarely did a season pass without the incident of some young girl destroying herself on account of impedi ments placed in the way of her affections.