This view of marriage would also account for the wide prevalence of female infanticide.

Because in the primitive condition of exogamy with male descent, girls could not be married in their own clan, as this would transgress the binding law of exogamy, and they could not be transferred from their own totem-clan and married in another except by force and rape.

Hence it was thought better to kill girl children than to suffer the ignominy of their being forcibly carried off.

Both kinds of female infanticide as distinguished by Sir H.Risley [173] would thus originally be due to the same belief.

The Khond killed his daughter because she could not be married otherwise than by forcible abduction; not necessarily because he was unable to protect her, but because he could not conceive of her being transferred from one totem-clan to another by any other means; and he was bound to resist the transfer because by acquiescing in it, he would have been guilty of disloyalty to his own totem, whose common life was injured by the loss of the girl.