Note 444.1 — Chapter XV · THE COUVADE AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE STRENGTH OF THE BLOOD-TIE—CONCLUSION OF THE INQUIRY INTO THE THEORY OF THE LIFE-TOKEN.

I have endeavoured to trace the conception of the kindred, or clan, as one body in a number of archaic practices. Beginning from the formal reception into the kin by the blood-covenant, which has been fully treated by Professor Robertson Smith, whose untimely death anthropological science will long deplore, and by Dr. Trumbull, we have devoted special attention to sacramental rites of burial and of marriage. Other rites and superstitions have come under notice; nor have we by any means exhausted the subject. We have found the unity of the kin a vital conception penetrating savage life to its core. In the words of Mr. Fison: “To the savage, the whole gens is the individual, and he is full of regard for it. Strike the gens anywhere, and every member of it considers himself struck, and the whole body corporate rises up in arms against the striker. The South Australian savage looks upon the universe as the Great Tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself belongs; and all things, animate and inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of the body corporate whereof he himself is part. They are ‘almost parts of himself,’ as Mr. Stewart shrewdly remarks.”444.1 Mr. Stewart would not have erred had he put it more strongly still; and the South Australian savages are only in a stage through which, there is reason to believe, every other people in the world has passed or is passing: so many and so widely scattered are its traces, and so deeply impressed are they upon human institutions and beliefs.