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This book is a curious mixture of the shrewd and the uncritical, the sensible and the naïve. Opinions will perhaps differ as to the proportions in which these characteristics are present; but to the psycho-analytical reader, if not to the anthropological, it will certainly seem that the latter qualities rather heavily preponderate over the former.
It has been the author's purpose to bring order out of the chaos which, he was pained to discover, abounds in anthropological literature in regard to the incest taboo—a chaos due to the fact that not only are numerous widely differing theories of the origin of this taboo extant, theories which seem to the author inadequate and fallacious in themselves, but in no case do their proponents make any attempt to define the term 'incest' or even to set out the facts which they profess to explain. Thus it first of all becomes the author's task—evidently a congenial one—to explode the several fallacies on which the various theories of the origin of the incest taboo have been, and are even still, based—fallacies in some instances so egregious, at least as represented or misrepresented by the author, that were one not already aware of the remarkable deficiency in psychological insight, for example, which anthropologists have evidenced on occasion, one might be tempted to suppose him guilty of setting up men of straw for the pleasure of knocking them down. However, untenable as are such notions as that early man was a 'legislator' and 'social reformer', that incest is 'unnatural' and the taboo upon it 'instinctive' or, on the other hand, rooted in reason, it soon appears that 'Freud's theories' are equally so—theories which, like the hypotheses earlier considered, 'have not the slightest atom of evidence to support them'. Unfortunately, however, there is not the slightest atom of evidence, either, that the author possesses any inkling of what Freud is talking about. 'The whole theory', he says, 'depends on the hypothesis that as s