The science of comparative philology has helped us to discover some of the primitive ideas attached to the names of the female members of the household. The root _ma_, _matar_, "mother," signifies the _creatrix_, "she who brings children into the world." The coming of a girl into the countries bordering on the Persian Gulf does not seem to have been the matter of regret that it was so frequently in the Orient; for the name "sister" appears to be connected with _svasti_, "good," or "good fortune"; while the daughter manifestly held the important place, in the pastoral life of the times, of milkmaid, from _duhitar_, "she who brings the milk from the cows." Lenormant, writing of this ancient period, says: "Marriage was a consecrated and free act, preceded by betrothal and symbolized by the joining of hands. The husband, in the presence of the priest, both while the priestly office was invested in the head of the family, and also after the priesthood became separate, took the right hand of the bride, pronouncing certain sacred formulæ; the bride was then conducted on a wagon drawn by two white oxen. The father of the bride presented a cow to his son-in-law, this was intended originally for the wedding feast, but in later times it was taken to the house of the bridegroom; this was the dowry, an emblem of agricultural richness. The bride's hair was parted with a dart; she was conducted around the domestic hearth and was then received at the door of her new abode with a present of fire and water." Many of these ancient customs which prevailed in the regions of Irania in the earliest times existed in the various branches of the Indo-European family in their scattered locations. There may be mentioned the fire ordeal, such a trial as that through which the virtuous Sita, heroine of the _Ramayana_, was compelled by her suspicious husband King Rama to pass in order to destroy his suspicions. There were two methods of testing a woman's virtue. By the first, she must pass unharmed through a trench filled with live coals. In the second, a succession of concentric circles, about ten inches apart, was marked out. A red-hot lance head, or another piece of similarly heated metal, must be carried by the accused woman without being burnt across the first eight circles and thrown into the ninth, and it must even then be sufficiently hot to scorch the grass within the last circle. If the hand that bore the red-hot metal was not burnt, the innocence of the accused was established.