The second primitive form of marriage is by purchase. This also is far less usual than many writers have assumed. There is indeed, very commonly, as in civilised society, an exchange of goods along with or previous to the marital ceremony. But with us it is not regarded as a purchase and sale when an American girl’s father gives his daughter and a million to a foreign nobleman in exchange for the title conferred on the bride. It may in reality be a mere commercial transaction, but in theory it is not so. Just as little is the “marriage by purchase” among most of the aboriginal tribes, where we find it in vogue. The exchange of goods is often a form of compensation to the household gods for the privilege of remaining a member of the clan, or for the permission to enter its ranks as an authorised resident. Of course, women were bought and sold as any other commodity; they were part of the booty of victors, and were dispensed as gifts, or kept for enjoyment. But when we confine ourselves to the examination of the strictly totemic marriage we find even among the wildest tribes that it was generally founded in mutual liking, that it was contracted under the sanction of the recognised family laws, and that its ritual was that of a religious ceremony.[253] The poor Bushmen, even, believe that the laws relating to marriage are of divine origin, enacted by the sacred ant-eater, and that their infraction will be severely punished.[254] The gifts which accompanied the rite were in the nature of offerings. Ceremonies of lustration and purification, in which the sacred elements, fire and water, took a prominent part, were general, and the relationship established was in its essence one of religious significance, and not one of mere secular import. _5. Relating to Death._—An attractive writer, Professor Frank Granger, remarks in a recent volume: “The first attitude of primitive man to his dead seems to have been one of almost unmixed terror.”[255] Would that we could give primitive man so much credit! But we cannot. The evidence is mountain-high that in the earliest and rudest period of human history the corpse inspired so little terror that it was nearly always eaten by the surviving friends![256] We can look back clearly through the corridors of time to that stage of development when death and the dead inspired no more terror or aversion in man than they do to-day among the carnivorous brutes. Throughout the whole of the palæolithic period of culture we discover extremely faint traces of any mode of sepulture, any respect for the dead.