[Sidenote: It is significant that mutual avoidance between blood relations of opposite sexes begins at or near puberty.] It seems obvious that these Melanesian customs of avoidance are the same, and must be explained in the same way whether the woman whom a man shuns is his wife’s mother or his own mother or his sister. Now it is highly significant that just as among the Akamba of East Africa the mutual avoidance of father and daughter only begins when the girl has reached puberty, so among the Melanesians the mutual avoidance of a boy on the one side and of his mother and sisters on the other only begins when the boy has reached or approached puberty. Thus in both peoples the avoidance between the nearest blood relations only commences at the dangerous age when sexual connexion on both sides begins to be possible. It seems difficult, therefore, to evade the conclusion that the mutual avoidance is adopted for no other reason than to diminish as far as possible the chances of sexual unions which public opinion condemns as incestuous. But if that is the reason why a young Melanesian boy, on the verge of puberty, avoids his own mother and sisters, it is natural and almost necessary to infer that it is the same reason which leads him, as a full-grown and married man, to eschew the company of his wife’s mother. [Sidenote: Mutual avoidance of mother and son, of father and daughter, and of brother and sister in the Caroline Islands.] Similar customs of avoidance between mothers and sons, between fathers and daughters, and between brothers and sisters are observed by the natives of the Caroline Islands, and the writer who records them assigns the fear of incest as the motive for their observance. “The prohibition of marriage,” he says, “and of sexual intercourse between kinsfolk of the same tribe is regarded by the Central Caroline natives as a divine ordinance; its breach is therefore, in their opinion, punished by the higher powers with sickness or death. The law influences in a characteristic way the whole social life of the islanders, for efforts {88} are made to keep members of families of different sexes apart from each other even in their youth. Unmarried men and boys, from the time when they begin to speak, may therefore not remain by night in the huts, but must sleep in the _fel_, the assembly-house. In the evening their meal (_âkot_) is brought thither to them by their mothers or sisters. Only when a son is sick may his mother receive him in the hut and tend him there. On the other hand entrance to the assembly-house (_fel_) is forbidden to women and girls except on the occasion of the _pwarik_ festival; whereas female members of other tribes are free to visit it, although, so far as I could observe, they seldom make use of the permission. Unmarried girls sleep in the huts with their parents.