Mr. M’Lennan has remarked, in relation to the curious customs of capturing women for wives found among peoples in all parts of the world, that “in almost all cases the form of capture is the symbol of a group-act—of a siege, or a pitched battle, or an invasion of a house by an armed band, while in a few cases only, and these much disintegrated, it represents a capture by an individual. On the one side are the kindred of the husband; on the other the kindred of the wife.”[250] Whatever may be the true explanation of the origin of exogamy, with which the custom referred to is connected, there can be no doubt of the truth of the statement that the wife-capture is now usually, although it sometimes has relation solely to the individual, the symbol of a group-act. This may not be in the sense intended by Mr. M’Lennan, who looks upon exogamy and polyandry as referable to one and the same cause, and who regards “all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous.”[251] The phenomena of wife-capture prove conclusively, however, that the family group to which the woman belonged possessed, or thought themselves entitled to, certain rights over her—rights of which they resisted the invasion, whether by an individual alone, or by a group of persons, or by an individual aided by the other members of a group. It is important to notice that the groups in question appear to consist, not of strangers to each other, or to the man or woman more immediately concerned, but of persons bound together by certain ties of blood. This is shown to be so by the fact that the capture is atoned for by the payment to the relations of the woman of the marriage-price, if this has not been agreed on beforehand.[252] It is required, moreover, by the conclusion arrived at by Mr. M’Lennan, that the tribes among whom the system of wife-capture prevails are chiefly those whose marriages are governed by the law of exogamy.[253] By exogamy is meant the practice of marrying out of the tribe or group of kindred,[254] and it is founded on a prejudice against marriage with kinsfolk.[255] There is some uncertainty as to the nature of M’Lennan’s primitive group, but, judging from his statement that “promiscuity, producing uncertainty of fatherhood, led to the system of kinship through mothers only,”[256] we may suppose that it consisted of a number of persons, all of whom, as the result of promiscuity, were related by blood. The first division into which he classes uncultured peoples, according to their marriage-rules, is that where tribes are separate, and all the members of the tribes are, or feign themselves to be, of the same blood.[257] Mr. Morgan very properly criticises this definition, which, he says, “might answer for a description of a gens; but the gens is never found alone, separate from other gentes. There are several gentes intermingled by marriage in every tribe composed of gentes,”[258] a fact which would seem to