Since this proposal of marriage followed on a fight between the boys and girls arising from the fact that one party had injured the other party's sex-totem, the fight may perhaps really have been a preliminary to the proposal and have represented a symbolic substitute for or survival of marriage by capture.

Among the Santals, Colonel Dalton says, "the social meal that the boy and girl eat together is the most important part of the ceremony, as by the act the girl ceases to belong to her father's tribe and becomes a member of the husband's family." Since the terms tribe and family are obviously used loosely in the above statement, we may perhaps substitute clan in both cases.

Many other instances of the rite of eating together at a wedding are given by Dr.Westermarck.

[172] If, therefore, it be supposed that the wedding ceremony consisted originally of the formal transfer of the bride to the bridegroom's clan, and further that the original tie which united the totem-clan was the common eating of the totem animal, then the practice of the bride and bridegroom eating together as a symbol of marriage can be fully understood.

When the totem animal had ceased to be the principal means of subsistence, bread, which to a people in the agricultural stage had become the staff or chief support of life, was substituted for it, as argued by Professor Robertson Smith in _The Religion of the Semites_.