Note 42 — Chapter V

Starcke’s theory. 9. Mr. Starcke42 in his account of exogamy attempts to draw a distinction between the license which would permit intercourse between kinsfolk and prohibit marriage between them:—“The clan, like the family, is a legal group, and the groups were kept together by legal bonds long before the ties of blood had any binding power. The same ideas which impelled a man to look for a wife outside his family, also impelled him to look for her outside the clan.” This depends upon the further assumption that early marriage was not simply a sexual relation, a fact which he can hardly be considered to have fully established.