My Dear Sir,

It gave me great pleasure to receive yesterday your letter of the 9^th. inst.¹ I have had a strong desire each year for several years to write to you; but have restrained myself from the consideration that your correspondence must be oppressively large, quite beyond your time and strength to attend to. I remember my short visit at your house with great delight, and am glad I made the venture which at the time I had some doubts about.²

In this letter I wish to speak of Mr Spencer’s position on the Domestic Relations as it appears in Part III of his recent volume on the Principles of Sociology, and in two supplementary chapters on the Evolution of the Family which have been published here in the Popular Science Monthly.³ In my recent volume I have discussed in Part III, the growth of the Family through successive forms.⁴ The views presented are not precisely in antagonism with Mr Spencer’s; but the bases of facts are altogether different, and so is the treatment of them. I shall not expect you will take the trouble to answer this letter, much as I should be gratified to have you do so.

The doctrine of Evolution which he has expounded and illustrated with so much ability is but an amplification of the Darwinian theory apart from which it would have no significance. You of course must be deeply interested in the results of his labors. It is the same with scholars in general. Confining myself to Part III. and the supplements I regret to find and to say, that in my judgment he has made a failure on the Domestic Relations; a failure so complete as to be very regretable. It will set back the science of Ethnology for some years because Mr Spencer has the ear of the world, and it will require time and hard labor to set his views aside. But it will certainly be done, and to his detriment as an investigator. An impression is already growing in this country among his admirers that he has covered too wide a field, and that some of his work is lamentably superficial.⁵ This part of his Sociology tends to prove it; at least, so it seems to me. It is a branch upon which I have worked for years, and upon which I can speak with some assurance. I am sorry thus to speak of any part of the work of one I admire so much.

Mr Spencer failed to discover the organic series of savage and barbarous tribes (gens, phratry, tribe and confederacy) by means of which they were organised and held together. The gentile organisation determined their houselife and architecture, and filled these joint tenement houses with families, in the main, of the same gens or clan, who practised communism in living. These facts have to do both with the form of the family, and with the domestic relations.⁶ Traces of these organisations appear in the pages of the numerous authors he consulted; but he fails to appreciate or to consider these organisations. He also ignores entirely systems of consanguinity and affinity, which contain the oldest, the most direct and specific record of the domestic relations in existence. It is a record with as many witnesses of its verity as there are persons bound together in the recognised relationships. They have outlived the customs in which they originated, and carry us back further into the early condition of mankind than any known records. He speaks of a polyandrous, a polygynous and a monogamian family among savage and barbarous tribes, but without a special description of either;⁷ whereas, demonstrably, neither of these families existed generally either among savage or barbarous tribes. For example, his polyandrous family is the Nair and Tibetan form, both of which are exceptional, and neither is explained.⁸ This polygynous family he finds everywhere; but the polygamy he is speaking of is exceptional in every tribe where it is found. Lastly, he says the Wood Veddas of Ceylon have the monogamian family.⁹ If so, they must have a system of consanguinity and affinity like our own, whereas, a thousand to one, their system is Turanian, and instead of the monogamian they have the pairing family of barbarians, which sprang out of a previous punaluan family (several brothers married in a group to each others’ wives, and several sisters married to each others’ husbands) which created the Turanian system.¹⁰ The same of the Hottentot and other tribes cited as having the monogamian family.¹¹ His general principles concerning the family are sound and excellent; but the basis of facts from which he draws his conclusions is too narrow, and the facts themselves are often misunderstood.

Mr Spencer has also been led into errors of fact by following M^r M^cLennan.¹² He speaks of exogamous tribes as though such tribes existed, whereas an exogamous tribe never has existed on the earth, and none such now exists. The cases cited by him were tribes composed of gentes. A man cannot marry a woman of his own gens for reasons of line; but he may marry a woman of any other gens of his own tribe. Several gentes are found in every tribe where exogamy is found, all the members of which are intermingled by marriage throughout the area occupied by the tribe. The gens is exogamous with respect to itself, and endogamous with respect to the remaining gentes of the same tribe. The two are always found side by side in the same tribe, and thus fail to represent opposite conditions of society, as Mr M^cLennan tried to show. “Exogamy” and “descent in the female line” (Mr M^cLennan’s “kinship through females only”) are simply rules of a gens, and ought to be stated as such.¹³ The gens is the primary fact, of which these rules are attributes. There again Mr Spencer by failing to ascertain the structure of savage and barbarous society lost the real basis of his theories. In the end he will regret that he ever wrote the chapter on “exogamy and endogamy”, which proves upon him an insufficient investigation of the facts. The poorest critic can say with impunity that he did not know what he was writing about, which never ought by any possibility to be said of such a man as Herbert Spencer.

I am sorry to have my book appear in England under such circumstances. The positions I have taken in respect to the growth of the family through successive forms are not in conflict with the general principles advanced by Mr Spencer, but are in harmony with them. The facts, however, with respect to the family are interpreted so differently that one of us must be excessively out of the way. Mr Spencer had my work on Consanguinity and with it the sequence of forms of the family.¹⁴ He undoubtedly thought them of no value.

Your work on the Origin of Species made a science of Ethnology possible. It is the advancement of this great science in which I am chiefly interested. We expected great help from Mr Spencer, but so far as the family is concerned, we have a set-back instead. But it will right up in time, and perhaps gain in the end through the labors of our successors.

Please present my compliments to Mrs Darwin | With great respect yours truly | L H. Morgan

Charles Darwin F.R.S.