The "religious dedication of women," which gratified at once the lust of priests and the demands of ancient theology that the gods should have the best of everything earthly, is another testimony to the preoccupation of early man with sex in its relation to religion.

This idea of the sacrifice of sex-relationship to the gods passed down through the ages until actual celibacy became the ideal of the holy life and the Divine was supposed to be better served by monks and nuns than by fathers and mothers.
In the family relation the experience of fathers, after they knew themselves to be such, has been widely varied and not along any single line of development.

To quote Le Tourneau again, "There has been no strict relation between intellectual development and the form of sexual union.

Even among monkeys, as in men, we find both polygamy and monogamy; and bees and other forms of lower life show a high degree of social organization and division of labor without the institution of the family at all." The relation of the sexes has always been a deep concern of human society even in most primitive forms of social order, but after men knew the connection between the gratification of sex-instinct and the procreative function, they began to reason about and to make more definite the customs that outlined permitted marriage.

The varieties of social expression in these ancient customs is witness alike to economic pressure, the effect of climate and immigration, political struggle and the institutions of war and of private property.
=Purchase and Capture of Wives.=--Purchase and capture began early to run a race in the supply of wives.