Fodor presents a carefully prepared, minutely detailed refutation of the historical data adduced by M. Woolf in a paper on the same subject published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1945. Both, however, come to essentially the same conclusions—which Fodor holds are without the need for any special hypothesis—that the origin of the Mosaic prohibition against cooking a suckling in its mother's milk, and also the Jewish Passover ritual, are derived from: 1, 'the early struggle between the matrilinear and the patrilinear customs of mankind'; and 2, 'an analogous conflict in general outlook between the nomadic and agricultural ways of life'.