Note 258.1 — Chapter XII · TOTEMISM—THE BLOOD COVENANT—CUSTOMS CONNECTED WITH SALIVA.

It will readily be understood that the ceremony of the blood-covenant cannot be thus truncated and altered in a variety of ways without a corresponding change in the rights and liabilities, the privileges and disabilities, entailed where the clan system is in the plenitude of its sway. When a Dyak welcomes a stranger by sprinkling the blood of a domesticated bird, or when two Italian girls exchange hairs, one party to the performance is not admitted to the kin of the other. No legal tie of blood results from the ceremony. For all that, a tie is formed. The tie of hospitality, or the tie of gossipry, is, in the contemplation of the Italian peasant, or the Dyak, a tie involving rights and duties similar within its limits to those of blood. So when two Slavs enter into adoptive brotherhood, the evolution of society, which has mollified the rude rite, has also shorn it of many of the resulting consequences; and kinsmen of this kind often betroth their children together while yet in the cradle, in order, we are expressly told, to strengthen the bond between them258.1—a betrothal usually impossible in archaic society, because as a rule marriage within the kin is forbidden. But it does not come within my design to do more than point out that these differences arise in the consequences, as well as in the forms, of the rite, and in both cases from the same cause—the growth of civilisation.