In India, it is unlawful for a Brahman to marry a wife whose clan name or gotra (literally, " cow-stall") is the same as his own, a prohibition which bars marriage among relatives in the male line indefinitely. This law appears in the Code of Manu as applying to the three first castes, and connexions on the female side are also forbidden to marry within certain wide limits. The Abbé Dubois, nevertheless, noticed among the Hindus a tendency to form marriages between families already connected by blood: but inasmuch as, according to his account, relatives in the male line go on calling one another brother and sister, and do not marry, as far as relationship can be traced, were it to the tenth generation, and the same in the female line, the very natural wish to draw closer the family tie can only be accomplished by crossing the male and female line, the brother's child marrying the sister's and so on.[1]
The Chinese people is divided into a number of clans, each distinguished by a name, which is borne by all its members, and corresponds to a surname, or better to a clan-name among ourselves, for the wife adopts her husband's, and the sons and daughters inherit it. The number of these clan-names is limited; Davis thinks there are not much above a hundred, but other writers talk of three hundred, and even of a thousand. Now, the Chinese law is that a man may not marry a woman of his own surname, so that relationship by the male side, however distant, is an absolute bar to marriage. This stringent prohibition of marriage between descendants of the male branch would seem to be very old, for the Chinese refer its origin to the mythic times of the Emperor Fu-hi, whose reign is placed before the Hea dynasty, which began, according to Chinese annals, in 2207 B.C. Fu-hi, it is related, divided the people into 100 clans, giving each a name, "and did not allow a man to marry a woman of the same name, whether a relative or not, a law
- ↑ Dubois, vol. i. p. 10. Mauu, i.i. 5. See Coleman, p. 291.
the first systematic and scientific attempt to elicit general principles from the chaotic mass of details of savage law, he endeavours to trace the origin of the marriage-laws of the lower races, and to point out their effects still remaining in the customs of civilized nations. His classification of peoples as "endogamous" or "exogamous," according to their habit of marrying within or without the tribe or clan, is of great value in simplifying this most difficult and obscure problem. [Note to 2nd Edition.]
