Mr M'Lennan (p. 29), with reference to the hurling "stones and bamboos at the head of the devoted bridegroom in Khondistan," says, "_the hurling of old shoes_ after the bridegroom among ourselves _may be_ a relic of a similar custom." But this custom would seem to be much more directly traced to the custom among the Jews of taking the shoes from the man who refused to marry his brother's widow (Deuteronomy), and which is more generally stated in Ruth iv. 7, as a token of _cession of right_--"the man _put off his shoe_, and gave it to his neighbour, _this was the testimony of a cession of right in Israel_" (Ruth iv. 7). This compels the remark that if Mr M'Lennan fails to prove that exogamy was universal, as a stage of human progress, or, to use a phrase of his own, "on such a scale as to entitle it to rank among the normal phenomena of human development," there is nothing to exclude the likelihood of its being much more satisfactorily and directly traced as the result of degeneracy. Mr M'Lennan should clear his ground by demonstrating that the circumstances exclude the possibility of this conjecture. On the contrary, and on his own showing, they would appear much more certainly to affirm it. Although exogamy is the earliest fact which he believes to be demonstrable by evidence, he assumes an initial promiscuity; and seems to see his way out of this initial promiscuity through the system of "rude polyandry" (when one woman was common to a determinate number of men unrelated) as distinguished from "regulated polyandry" (where one woman was common to several brothers). It must be noted that before these polyandrous families, if we may so call them, at first necessarily limited, could theoretically or in fact have become the tribal exogamous groups, many difficulties must be disposed of, and many stages traced, of which we are told nothing more than that we are "forced to regard all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous" (p. 226). That these families, if it is not an abuse of terms to call them so, could not have become tribal by grouping, Mr M'Lennan himself maintains, p. 232.