ves of the
fetich-worshipper. My friend, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, who has for many
years studied the manners of the people of New Caledonia, asked a
native _why_ he treasured a certain fetich stone. The man replied
that, in one of the vigils which are practised beside the corpses of
deceased friends, he saw a lizard. The lizard is a totem, a worshipful
animal in New Caledonia. The native put out his hand to touch it, when
it disappeared and left a stone in its place. This stone he therefore
held sacred in the highest degree. Here then a fetich-stone was
indicated as such by a spirit in form of a lizard.

[202] Much the same theory is propounded in Mr. Mueller's lectures on
'The Science of Religion.'

[203] The idea is expressed in a well-known parody of Wordsworth,
about the tree which--

'Will grow ten times as tall as me
And live ten times as long.'

[204] See Essay on 'The Early History of the Family.'

[205] Bergaigne's _La Religion Vedique_ may be consulted for Vedic
Fetichism.

THE FAMILY.

_THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE FAMILY._

What are the original forms of the human family? Did man begin by
being monogamous or polygamous, but, in either case, the master of his
own home and the assured central point of his family relations? Or
were the unions of the sexes originally shifting and precarious, so
that the wisest child was not expected to know his own father, and
family ties were reckoned through the mother alone? Again (setting
aside the question of what was 'primitive' and 'original'), did the
needs and barbarous habits of early men lead to a scarcity of women,
and hence to polyandry (that is, the marriage of one woman to several
men), with the consequent uncertainty about male parentage? Once more,
admitting that these loose and strange relations of the sexes do
prevail, or have prevailed, among savages, is there any reason to
suppose that the stronger races, the Aryan and Semitic stocks, ever
passed through this stage of savage customs? These are the main
questions debated between what we may call the 'historical' and the
'anthropological' students of ancient customs.

When Sir Henry Maine observed, in 1861, that it was difficult to say
what society of men had _not been_, originally, based on the
patriarchal family, he went, of course, outside the domain of history.
What occurred in the very origin of human society is a question
perhaps quite inscrutable. Certainly, history cannot furnish th