rtured by
her mother."[1724] The father, however, is always known or
assumed. How else could the father move up one grade in tribal
position when the boy is initiated?[1725] Amongst several tribes
of central Australia it is believed that "the child is not the
direct result of intercourse, that it may come without this,
which merely, as it were, prepares the mother for the reception
and birth of an already formed spirit child who inhabits one of
the local totem centers."[1726] Melanesian women feel severely
the strain of child rearing. They seem to have less love for the
children than the fathers have. They often kill the babes. If an
unmarried girl becomes pregnant, she says that some man who hates
her got the help of spirits, who caused her situation.[1727] The
Indians in British Columbia think that a woman conceives by
eating, and this belief is introduced into their folk
tales.[1728] The rules about the food of women are often
connected with notions about sex relations and procreation. The
Seri of California thought that fire is bestial, not physical,
and is produced similarly to sexual reproduction.[1729] In
ancient Greece "the inferiority of women to men was strongly
asserted, and it was illustrated and defended by a very curious
physiological notion that the generative power belonged
exclusively to men, women having only a very subordinate part in
the production of their children."[1730] This notion is
expressed in the _Eumenides_, where it is said to lessen the
crime of Orestes. His mother did not generate him. She received
and nursed the germ. In Islam this same opinion prevails. It is a
father family doctrine, exactly opposite to that of the mother
family, where the function of the mother was thought far more
important.[1731] It is a good example of the way in which the
philosophy follows the view taken in the mores of the leading
interest.

+543. Blood revenge and the in-group.+ Blood revenge is out of place in
the in-group. It would mean self-extermination of the group. It would
serve the interests of the enemies in the out-groups. Hence the double
interest of harmony and cooperation in the in-group and war strength
against the out-groups forces the invention of devices by which to
supersede blood revenge in the in-group. Chiefs and priests administered
group interests, especially war and other collisions with neigh