Now we mentioned in our first chapter that, in connection with the primal law, certain cases of so-called avoidance, and especially that between near relatives, would have interest for us and probably afford aid in proof. We drew attention to the strange features marking these customs, which had rendered their origin a source of wondering conjecture to all inquirers. It may be that precisely the actual anomalism of these characteristics may render them eloquent in our case. In view of our past argument, in very deed, nothing now becomes insignificant in these quaint rules of non-propinquity between certain near relations; nothing inexpressive in the ordinance of non-recognition between individuals well known to each other; nothing not suggestive in the dread of mere contact between those whom nature would place closest together, no lack of import in the strange taciturnity so incongruous with our garrulous later days of unloosed tongues. There is a possible vestige of a past era of dumb show in their eloquent muteness; of connection in their actual utter unreason with a long dead past of all unfamiliar habits and manners. Further, is verily aught lacking, in these latter-day customs of avoidance, of the necessarily archaic features of a possible primeval law? If these in truth were still existent, would they not, with such traits in common, be simply classed with those? Undoubtedly so, as it seems to me. Now in the course of our argument it has appeared that the inclusion of the son as the second adult male in a group would evolve, as the most primitive rule of action, restriction of intercourse between its component females and the intruder. But in such a group, the former would necessarily be to the latter in the relation of mother and sisters. Such restriction, again, taking the only possible form, would be avoidance of these relations, and thus there is a concurrence in resemblance with that particular habit of avoidance on which we enlarged in our first pages, viz. that between brother and sister (and now less strictly), between mother and son. Do we not thus seem to lay a finger on an actual law, still an every-day working factor in savage life, which is not only identical with, but is in very deed the primal law itself, in form at least? The acceptation of such intolerably irksome restraints as avoidance, in the daily economy of savage life, has seemed forcibly to imply a fundamental cause of profound depth. This cause now seems laid open to us. The unaccountable and seemingly unreasonable restrictions on intercourse which mark it thus betray their appropriate origin in a time of comparative unreason.