A prolix and not too clear paper discussing anthropological and psycho-analytic data bearing on the relation of incest barriers to the development of human civilization. The analytic evidence is apparently taken from a paper by Jones in 1925 and from Freud's 'Totem and Taboo'. On psycho-analytic and anthropological grounds the family is held to be the primitive human group. The family became consolidated by the acceptance of incest barriers. These barriers arose not to check the lust of the father, but to produce a harmonious family group and to change it from a natural into a social group. The formulation of the incest barriers occurred unconsciously. Freud's discovery of the 'incest complex' in all of us is stressed in its relation to our understanding savage culture and in enabling