Two facts of importance in the history of Aryan marriage have now been shown. The first, inferred from the _domum deductio_ and from the existence of marriage by capture and by purchase, is that amongst the undispersed Aryans a man customarily abstained from marrying a woman belonging to his own family group. The second is that the family groups in which the Aryans lived, if not originally, certainly for some time before their dispersion, were joint undivided families. The Aryan was averse to marrying women of his Near Kin; the difficult question now arises, whether he was equally averse to marrying into his Remote Kin? The "prohibited degrees" of historic times do not help us much in answering this question. The Athenians had lost the Aryan aversion to marriages within the near kin: they married their cousins, and even half-sisters. There is no evidence to show that the Romans ever abstained from marrying their Remote Kin. Rossbach maintains that the prohibition extended only to first cousins; Klenze, Walter, Burchardy, Göttling, and Gerlach make it go as far as the extreme limit of the Near Kin, _i.e._, to second cousins once removed—no writer on Roman law or marriage supports a wider prohibition; and the _jus osculi_[127] (which, by the way, was accorded by men to men as well as by women to men) extended only to the near kin. The Hindoos, again, were averse to marriage between any persons of the same name. Does the Hindoo system come down from pro-ethnic times, or is it a development peculiar among Aryan nations to the Hindoos? Many savages have a much wider circle of prohibited degrees than civilised peoples possess, and amongst civilised peoples themselves the number of prohibited degrees has even in historic times diminished. We thus seem to get a sort of law of diminishing degrees, which would point to the Hindoo system as that which was known to the pro-ethnic Aryans. But though some savages have more prohibited degrees than civilised men have, other savages have few or none. The downward movement, therefore, from the maximum to the minimum number of prohibited degrees which is observable in historic times must have been preceded in pre-historic ages by an upward movement from the minimum to the maximum; and, as far as the evidence at present goes, though the upward movement may, in pro-ethnic times, have proceeded as far as the Remote Kin, it may equally well only have reached to the limits of the Near Kin; while, after the Aryan dispersion, the movement may have continued upwards amongst the Hindoos, downwards amongst the Athenians, and, for a long time, have ceased to move in any direction amongst the conservative Romans.