That the ancestors of the Aryan-speaking peoples passed through the ‘stone age’ of culture, few will deny. That they also passed through the totemic stage as regards marriage law is, however, a problem perhaps not to be solved. For reasons unknown, the ‘white’ races (not to speak of Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese, and Japanese) have a peculiar aptitude for civilisation, are peculiarly accessible to ideas. It might therefore be argued that conceivably they were readily accessible to the idea of blood kinship. The maternal affection, in a race whose children (unlike the offspring of the lower animals) are so long in attaining maturity, cannot but suggest the idea of blood kinship. Among totemic peoples it seems that this idea was originally defined by the totem name, a definition at once too wide and too narrow. It is not physically unthinkable that our own ancestors may have been more acutely intelligent, and, if so, why should not they simply forbid unions between persons too near akin in blood? We have found no such moral or instinctive reason among totemic peoples who were, apparently, led to exogamy, first by non-moral causes, or causes in which the moral element was not explicit, and then, by aid of corollaries from rules thus based, came to forbid marriages of ‘too near flesh.’ Without the training of totemic institutions, it is hard to see how the Aryan-speaking peoples (however naturally gifted from the first) arrived at the same conception of incest. It seems absurd to suppose that black men and red men arrived at the idea of incest, and at the laws which prohibit it, by the devious and unpromising path of Totemism, while white men reached the same point in some other way. Yet if it has appeared difficult to find traces of Totemism among the Melanesians, much more difficult must it be to prove that races with so long a civilised history as, for example, the Greeks, were once under totemic institutions. I have already indicated my inclination to believe that Totemism has left its traces, in Greece, in the myths of descent from bulls, bears, swans, dogs, ants, and so forth, and in certain peculiar aspects of animal worship. It is usual for scholars to explain these facts away, as things borrowed by early Greeks from some other race. But ‘the receiver is as bad as the thief,’ and if Greeks were capable of accepting totemic ideas, they were capable of evolving totemic institutions. We are not to invent an ideal ‘Aryan,’ and then to explain all his traces of savagery as borrowings by him from some unknown prior race. There is no reason at all for supposing that the peoples who speak languages called, for convenience, ‘Aryan,’ were better bred than any other peoples at the beginning.