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Edinburgh new philosophical journal (1857)
Edinburgh new philosophical journal - 1857 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: part of the common state or confederacy, has not been handed down from the darkness of ages, because the Hellenic civilization very soon succeeded in obliteratin... more »g most of the traces of this institution of barbarism. Yet the Roman history has preserved the following facts, that bear upon this very question. Between some tribes or little nations there existed eonnu- bium, so that their members might contract a legitimate marriage ; between others this connection was unlawful, as in the oldest times between the Patres and Plebeii; marriages were concluded per coemptionem, by sale. When Romulus and his band of lawless Latin youths wanted to acquire wives in a more chivalrous fashion, they did not rob them from their own tribe, but from the Sabines. This fact is completely Siberian or American. But are we to guess there was a time when the practice of buying or robbing women from a collateral clan was considered obligatory, as well as permitted, among some of the barbarous tribes in Europe ? Unheard of it cannot have been in antiquity, since we find it preserved even to this day by one nation at least, viz., the Albanians or Arnauts, by whom the manners of their barbarous ancestors, the Greek heroes, are kept up in all but the antique and pure originality. Among their manners Hahn (A Ibane- sische Studien, 1854) remarks, " That being divided into many clans, intermarriage is prohibited within the same clan (p. 153). The bride is bought by the bridegroom at rather a high price " (p. 180). The concomitants that attend this system among the natives of America and Siberia, internal wars, family feuds, hereditary for generations, are sufficiently known to flourish to perfection both among Christian and Mahome- dan Albanese, quite as much among the believers in a heathen Shamanism o...« less