Note 210 — THE FAMILY.

Here I would like to point out that Mr. M‘Lennan’s theory was not so hard and fast as his manner (that of a very assured believer in his own ideas) may lead some inquirers to suppose. Sir Henry Maine writes, that both Mr. Morgan and Mr. M‘Lennan ‘seem to me to think that human society went everywhere through the same series of changes, and Mr. M‘Lennan, at any rate, expresses himself as if all those stages could be clearly discriminated from one another, and the close of one and the commencement of another announced with the distinctness of the clock-bell telling the end of the hour.’ On the other hand, I remember Mr. M‘Lennan’s saying that, in his opinion, ‘all manner of arrangements probably went on simultaneously in different places.’ In Studies in Ancient History, p. 127, he expressly guards against the tendency ‘to assume that the progress of the various races of men from savagery has been a uniform progress: that all the stages which any of them has gone through have been passed in their order by all.’ Still more to the point is his remark on polyandry among the very early Greeks and other Aryans; ‘it is quite consistent with my view that in all these quarters (Persia, Sparta, Troy, Lycia, Attica, Crete, etc.) monandry, and even the patria potestas, may have prevailed at points.’