This is a plausible and taking theory, and I am far from arguing that it cannot be a true theory. But the insuperable difficulty of deciding arises from the circumstance that we know nothing at all about the intellectual condition of the more or less human beings among whom the prohibition of marriage within the group first arose. Were they advanced enough to be capable of such a superstitious dread of each other as the supposed cause of the prohibition takes for granted? Males and females, among the lower animals, have no such superstition. It requires human imagination. On the other hand, animal jealousy was well within their reach, and Mr. Atkinson derives the original prohibition of marriage within the group from the sheer sexual jealousy of the animal-patriarch. In his opinion the consequent aversion to such wedlock crystallised into a habit, as the race advanced towards full humanity. Even before his anthropoid clients were completely human, the group would be replete with children of females not of the full group blood, captives, and therefore these children (if blood kin through females were regarded) would be eligible as wives. But this would not yet, of course, be understood. Perhaps it would not be fully understood till the totem name was given to, and accepted by, each group, and so there was a definite mark set on each woman brought in from without the group, and on her children, who bore her totem name. After that, each totem group obviously contained members of other totems, and those, being now recognised by their mother’s totem names, were technically intermarriageable. What had been a group not explicitly conscious of its own heterogeneous elements, became, in fact, an assemblage of _recognised_ heterogeneousness, capable of finding legal brides within itself, and no longer under the necessity (had it understood) of capturing brides from without in hostile fashion. Such an assemblage would, or might, come to consist of families, dwelling, or rather wandering, within a given region, all on terms of friendship and mutual aid. I take it that, by this time, improved weapons and instruments, and improved skill, enabled groups larger than the small original groups to live in a given area. In fact, the group would, or might, be a small local ‘tribe,’ but, probably, was unconscious of the circumstance. If conscious, one cause of hostility among the groups was at an end, there was no necessity for stealing women, a system of peaceful betrothals within the group might now arise, though certain facts, to be dealt with later, raise a presumption, perhaps, that this relatively peaceful state of life did not appear until two of the original local totem groups coalesced in _connubium_, intermarrying with each other, in fact becoming ‘phratries.’