but we know nothing whatever, I repeat, about absolutely primitive human society. Hence a sober enquirer who seeks to elucidate the social evolution of mankind in ages before the dawn of history must start, not from an unknown and purely hypothetical primæval man, but from the lowest savages whom we know or possess adequate records of; and from their customs, beliefs, and traditions as a solid basis of fact he may work back a little way hypothetically through the obscurity of the past; that is, he may form a reasonable theory of the way in which these actual customs, beliefs, and traditions have grown up and developed in a period more or less remote, but probably not very remote, from the one in which they have been observed and recorded. But if, as I assume, he is a sober enquirer, he will never expect to carry back this reconstruction of human history very far, still less will he dream of linking it up with the very beginning, because he is aware that we possess no evidence which would enable us to bridge even hypothetically the gulf of thousands or millions of years which divides the savage of to-day from primæval man. [Sidenote: For example, the marriage customs and systems of relationship prevalent among many savage tribes appear to have been evolved from a preceding, but not necessarily primitive, state of sexual promiscuity.] It may be well to illustrate my meaning by an example. The matrimonial customs and modes of tracing relationships which prevail among some savage races, and even among peoples at a higher stage of culture, furnish very strong grounds for believing that the systems of marriage and consanguinity which are now in vogue among civilized peoples must have been immediately preceded at a more or less distant time by very different modes of counting kin and regulating marriage; {165} in fact, that monogamy and the forbidden degrees of kinship have replaced an older system of much wider and looser sexual relations. But to say this is not to affirm that such looser and wider relations were characteristic of the absolutely primitive condition of mankind; it is only to say that actually existing customs and traditions clearly indicate the extensive prevalence of such relations at some former time in the history of our race. How remote that time was, we cannot tell; but, estimated by the whole vast period of man’s existence on earth, it seems probable that the era of sexual communism to which the evidence points was comparatively recent; in other words, that for the civilized races the interval which divides that era from our own is to be reckoned by thousands rather than by hundreds of thousands of years, while for the lowest of existing savages, for example, the aborigines of Australia, it is possible or probable that the interval may not be greater than a few centuries. Be that as it may, even if on the strength of the evidence I have referred to we could demonstrate the former prevalence