The Project Gutenberg EBook of Primitive Love and Love-Stories
by Henry Theophilus Finck

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Title: Primitive Love and Love-Stories

Author: Henry Theophilus Finck

Release Date: April 7, 2004 [EBook #11934]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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PRIMITIVE LOVE AND LOVE-STORIES

BY HENRY T. FINCK

1899

_DEDICATED TO ONE WHO TAUGHT THE AUTHOR THAT CONJUGAL AFFECTION IS NOT
INFERIOR TO ROMANTIC LOVE_

PREFACE

On page 654 of the present volume reference is made to a custom
prevalent in northern India of employing the family barber to select
the boys and girls to be married, it being considered too trivial and
humiliating an act for the parents to attend to. In pronouncing such a
custom ludicrous and outrageous we must not forget that not much more
than a century ago an English thinker, Samuel Johnson, expressed the
opinion that marriages might as well be arranged by the Lord
Chancellor without consulting the parties concerned. Schopenhauer had,
indeed, reason to claim that it had remained for him to discover the
significance and importance of love. His ideas on the relations
between love, youth, health, and beauty opened up a new vista of
thought; yet it was limited, because the question of heredity was only
just beginning to be understood, and the theory of evolution, which
has revolutionized all science, had not yet appeared on the horizon.

The new science of anthropology, with its various branches, including
sociology, ethnology, and comparative psychology, has within the last
two or three decades brought together and discussed an immense number
of facts relating to man in his various stages of
development--savagery, barbarism, semi-civilization, and civilization.
Monographs have appeared in great numbers on various customs and
institutions, including marriage, which has been discussed in several
exhaustive volumes. Love alone has remained to be specially considered
from an evolutionary point of view. My own book, _Romantic Lo