m, and disappeared from view. His wife, hearing a
cry, turned round, and seeing her husband's fate,
sprang into the river, shrieking 'Take me also,' and
dived down at the spot where she had seen the alligator
sink with his prey. No persuasion could induce her to
come out of the water; she swam about, diving in all
the places most dreaded from being a resort of
ferocious reptiles, seeking to die with her husband; at
last her friends came down and forcibly removed her to
their house."

These stories certainly imply conjugal attachment, but is there any
indication in them of affection? The Cherokee squaw mourns the
impending death of her husband, which is a selfish feeling. The
Californian, similarly, laments the loss of his spouse. The only thing
he does is to "tar his face in mourning," and even this is regarded by
the other Indians as "extraordinary" and "unprecedented." As for the
woman in the third story, it is to be noted that her act is one of
selfish despair, not of self-sacrifice for her husband's sake. We
shall see in later chapters that women of her grade abandon themselves
to suicidal impulses, not only where there is occasion for real
distress, but often on the most trivial pretexts. A few days later, in
all probability, that same woman would have been ready to marry
another man. There is no evidence of altruistic action--action for
another's benefit--in any of these incidents, and altruism is the only
test of genuine affection as distinguished from mere liking,
attachment, and fondness, which, as was explained in the chapter on
Affection, are the products of selfishness, more or less disguised. If
this distinction had been borne in mind a vast amount of confusion
could have been avoided in works of exploration and the
anthropological treatises based on them. Westermarck, for instance,
cites on page 357 a number of authors who asserted that sexual
affection, or even the appearance of it, was unknown to the Hovas of
Madagascar, the Gold Coast, and Winnabah natives, the Kabyles, the
Beni-Amer, the Chittagong Hill Tribes, the Ponape islanders, the
Eskimo, the Kutchin, the Iroquois, and North American Indians in
general; while on the next pages he cites approvingly authors who
fancied they had discovered sexual affection among tribes some of whom
(Australians, Andamanese, Bushmans) are far below the peoples just
mentioned. The cause of this discrepancy lies not in the