; the roughness of
the actual method of constant movement led to the conscious adoption
of social forms which has altered man's history. These considerations
bring us to the conclusion that it is during the period of migratory
movement that man has developed the social and religious elements with
which the anthropologist finds him endowed, when at last in modern
days he has been brought within the ken of scientific observation, and
that therefore it is as a migratory not a stationary organism that the
evolution of human society has to be studied, aided by the fact that
enforced stationary conditions have produced in the savage world
examples of perhaps the most remote as well as the more recent types
of primitive humanity.

This last possibility, however, is not admitted by the best
authorities. They endeavour to use biological methods in order to get
behind existing savagery for the earliest period of human savagery.
Darwin is not satisfied with the evidence as to promiscuity, strong as
it appeared to him to be, and he pronounced it to be "extremely
improbable" in a state of nature, and falls back upon the evidence of
the rudimentary stages of human existence, there being, as among the
gorillas, but one adult male in the band, and "when the young male
grows up, a contest takes place for the mastery, and the strongest, by
killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of
the community."[304] Mr. McLennan nowhere states the evidence for his
first stage of human society--the primitive horde without any ideas of
kinship, and based upon a fellowship of common interests and
dangers[305]--but arrives at it by argument deduced from the
conditions of later stages of development, and from the necessary
suppositions as to the pre-existing stage which must have led to the
later. Mr. Westermarck leads us straight to the evidence of the lower
animals, from which he arrives at the small groups of humans headed by
the male, and provides us with the theory of a human pairing
season.[306] Mr. Morgan claims that no exemplification of mankind in
his assumed lower status of savagery remained to the historical
period,[307] presumably meaning the anthropo-historical period. And
finally, Mr. Lang definitely claims that conjecture, and conjecture
alone, remains as the means of getting back to the earliest human
origins.[308]

There is great danger in relying too closely upon conjecture. We shall
be repeating in anthropo