r any other family."

This tradition is more sensible and natural, by a good deal, than the
Christian tradition, taught by the Bible. It shows plainly the rise of
the consanguine groups. Moreover, Paul Lafargue, makes in the "Neue
Zeit" the sagacious, and, we think, felicitous point, that names, such
as Adam and Eve, are not names of individual persons, but the names of
gentes, in which, at the time, the Jews were joined. Lafargue solves by
his argument a series of otherwise obscure and contradictory passages in
the first Book of Moses. Again, M. Beer calls attention, likewise in the
"Neue Zeit," that, to this day, it is a conjugal custom among Jews that
the bride and the bridegroom's mother _may not carry the same name_,
otherwise--thus runs this belief--a misfortune will befall the family:
sickness and death will pursue them. In our opinion, this is a further
proof for the correctness of Lafargue's theory. The gentile organization
forbids marriage between persons that descend from the same gens stock.
Such a common descent must be considered to exist, according to gentile
principles, between the bride, that carries the name of "Eve," and the
bridegroom's mother of the same name. Modern Jews, of course, have no
longer the remotest suspicion of the real connection between their
prejudice and their old gentile constitution, which forbade such
marriages of relatives. The old gentile order had for its object to
avoid the degenerating consequences of in-breeding. Although this
gentile constitution has for thousands of years been destroyed among the
Jews, tradition, as we see, has continued to live in superstition.

Quite possible, the experience, made at an early day with the breeding
of animals, revealed the harmfulness of in-breeding. How far this
experience went transpires from the manner in which, according to the
first Book of Moses, chap. 30, verse 32 and sequel, Jacob understood how
to outwit his father-in-law Laban, by knowing how to encompass the birth
of eanlings that were streaked and pied, and which, according to Laban's
promises, were to be Jacob's. The old Israelites had, accordingly, long
before Darwin, studied Darwinism.

Once upon the subject of the conditions existing among the old Jews, a
few other facts are in order, clearly proving that, among them, descent
in the female line was actually in force of old. True enough, on the
subject of woman, I Moses, 3, 16, runs this wise: "And thy desire shall
be to