One important fact must here, however, be noted; that before such death or exile takes place, and the sons reach an age which enables them successfully to dispute the supremacy of the father, the daughters have reached puberty and borne produce to the sire--this matter, as will be seen later, has an important bearing on our general argument--on our theory of Primal Law. Amongst horses, again, which have become wild, exactly the same facts are to be observed. Each herd has one head, and this, as natural selection would imply, is the most powerful stallion; he is the master and owner of the females, and this mastery he retains until overpowered by other males, which, as before, are almost invariably his own progeny. In fact, any strange male would probably have first to run the gauntlet of this outlying herd of exiled sons before he could reach the father. It is, however, again to be noted that he is rarely thus overpowered by even the combined efforts of his sons, before his daughters have reached such an age as to have produced offspring to their father. This system of sequence of generations in breeding is, indeed, so universal in a state of nature amongst all animals, as to seem to point to the fact that in-breeding between father and daughter cannot be so prejudicial as some believe. Its efficacy in type-fixing is at least very great, if, as experiments of my own in pig-breeding on these lines would lead me to think, the question of prepotency is merely a matter of such close in-breeding repeated for generations. We may note here that if, as is probable, the produce, on the contrary, of a full brother and sister are degenerate, nature seems to attempt to prevent its occurrence. On the succession of the sons to the father’s rights, speedy conflicts from sexual jealousy arise amidst the former and lead to a rapid segregation of the herd, in which the chances of own brother and sister continuing to mate are slight. Until this segregration, however, does take place, nothing is more curious to watch than the attitude and relations of these young males among themselves, the oldest and strongest claiming prior marital rights, but no more. The same phenomena in social economy may be observed with even greater intensity in lower ranks of life than the quadrupeds. For instance, in a large flock of game fowl which I had an opportunity to observe closely for several years, during which they had nearly relapsed into a state of nature, there was an exact reproduction of all these details. There existed the same division into small family groups, each headed by an adult male, the same subordination imposed on the junior males of their banishment at puberty, as also their inevitable combined attack, when sufficiently powerful, on their paternal enemy. His death resulted in the same communistic assumption of his rights, with a subsequent disruption, from jealousy, into the typical smaller and separate groups.