Of course I agree with Mr. Huth in thinking that there is no innate aversion to marriage with _near relations_. What I maintain is, that there is an innate aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living very closely together from early youth, and that, as such persons are in most cases related, this feeling displays itself chiefly as a horror of intercourse between near kin. The existence of an innate aversion of this kind has been taken by various writers as a psychological fact proved by common experience;[1904] and it seems impossible otherwise to explain the feeling which makes the relationships between parents and children, and brothers and sisters, so free from all sexual excitement. But the chief evidence is afforded by an abundance of ethnographical facts which prove that it is not, in the first place, by the degrees of consanguinity, but by the close living together that prohibitory laws against intermarriage are determined. Egede asserts that, among the Greenlanders, it would be reckoned uncouth and blamable, if a lad and a girl who had served and been educated in one family, desired to be married to one another;[1905] and, according to Dr. Nansen, it is preferred that the contracting parties should belong to different settlements.[1906] Colonel Macpherson states that, among the Kandhs, marriage cannot take place even with strangers who have been long adopted into, or domesticated with, a tribe.[1907] And Mr. Cousins writes to me that the Cis-Natalian Kafirs dislike marriage between persons who live very closely together, whether related or not. In the Northern New Hebrides, a girl betrothed in childhood is sometimes taken to her future father-in-law’s house and brought up there. Dr. Codrington says that “the boy often thinks she is his sister, and is much ashamed when he comes to know the relation in which he stands.”[1908]