It remains to be seen if, in further unravelling its tangled web, other threads of actual custom may not be found as apparently eloquent of a far distant, unfamiliar past, in their present abnormal features; other usages in every-day lower (savage) life, which in the light of a primal law shall furnish an unexpected solution of many perplexing problems in social evolution. If it can be shown that their inception would have been in happy accordance with the resolution of necessary incidents in evolutionary progress, may we not legitimately infer both that such customs thus had their origin, and again that these incidents really occurred? Our further research into the development of social institutions will point out indisputably, that primitive society was now on the eve of a succession of events in social order, presenting quite a series of menacing complications--their resolution will seemingly entail inevitably the continuous evolution of law in remedy, which law would have presented features identical with the actual laws of avoidance and others. [Footnote 1: It is clear that, for this reason, natural selection would favour the new kind of group. The arrangement would be imitated.--A. L.] [Footnote 2: With portentous endurance of custom towards these.] [Footnote 3: Herr Cunow, as we showed, regards the ‘classes’ (not the ‘phratries’) of Australian tribes as based on a rough and ready calculation of non-intermarrying generations.--A. L.] [Footnote 4: See also Westermarck, pp. 458, 459, on the Khyoungtha, a Chittagong hill tribe. After marriage a younger brother is allowed to touch the hand, to speak and laugh with his elder brother’s wife, but it is thought improper for the elder brother even to look at the wife of his younger brother. This is a custom more or less among all hill tribes, it is found carried to even a preposterous extent among the Santals.] [Footnote 5: As a fact the ‘classes’ (probably distinctions, originally, of generations) do not, I think, indicate ‘group marriage.’--A. L.] [Footnote 6: Westermarck, _ut supra_, pp. 387-389, 546, agrees. For the opposite view, cf. Crawley, p. 367. Westermarck does not seem very sure of his own mind.--A. L.] NOTE TO CHAPTER V Marriage by Hostile Capture