Systems of Consanguinity

Abstract

I AM sorry to find that on some points I have misunderstood the views of my friend Mr. Morgan (vol. xii. p. 86), and the more so as, after reading his letter very carefully, I am not sure that I quite comprehend them even now. Your reviewer is no doubt able to reply for himself: but it certainly seems to me not remarkable that both he and I should have been led into error. Indeed, I do not exactly understand whether Mr. Morgan intends to say that we have misapprehended his views in supposing that in his opinion one of the two great systems of classification of relationships is “arbitrary, artificial, and intentional.” Mr. Morgan admits that he himself used these terms in several places. There are, he says, “three or four places, and perhaps more, in that volume in which I speak of the system of a particular people as ‘artificial and complicated,’ and as ‘arbitrary and artificial,’ without the qualification in each case which should, perhaps, have been inserted.” Thus your reviewer and I were, as he himself allows, using his very own words, though I shall of course omit them if my book should reach a fourth edition.