NOTE TO CHAPTER V
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Marriage by Hostile Capture
Mr. Atkinson accepts, for the excessively early stage of semi-human society with which his hypothesis deals, the necessity of procuring mates for the young bucks by capture from a hostile group. Now Dr. Westermarck writes, 'Mr. McLennan thinks that marriage by capture arose from the rule of exogamy;' and Mr. Atkinson holds that it arose from the necessity of the case. The old patriarch allowed no female born within his group to be united to his sons. Dr. Westermarck says, 'It seems to me extremely probable that the practice of capturing women for wives is due chiefly to the aversion to close intermarrying ... together with the difficulty a savage man has in procuring a wife in a friendly manner, without giving compensation for the loss he inflicts on her father' (Westermarck, 368-369). He admits a period when 'the idea of barter had hardly occurred to man's mind,' But Mr. Atkinson is thinking of a state of affairs in which the idea of barter had not occurred at all. Even at Dr. Westermarck's stage of the dawn of barter, 'marriage by capture must have been very common.' But Mr. Crawley argues that because, in his opinion, 'types of formal and connubial capture' are not survivals from actual capture, therefore 'the theory that mankind ... ever, in normal circumstances, were accustomed to obtain their wives by capture from other tribes, may be regarded as exploded' (Mystic Rose, p. 367). This dictum does not affect Mr. Atkinson's theory. Semi-human beings, in the conditions imagined by him, might be obliged to get their wives by capture, whether existing types of so-called formal capture are survivals of actual hostile capture or not. If Mr. Atkinson accepts the formal abductions as survivals of real captures and so as proofs of his argument, and if such formal abductions are not survivals of real capture—still, as Dr. Westermarck says, even after the supposed stage of semi-human life, 'marriages by capture must have been very common'—in Mr. Atkinson's hypothetical still earlier stage, they must have been universal.