About the author…

Edward Westermarck (1862-1939) taught sociology and moral philosophy at the University of Helsinki; later, he taught sociology at the Univerity of London. He is perhaps best known for his anthropological works on marriage. In moral philosophy, he attempted to provide a basis for the sociological study of moral behavior. Louis ĽAmour wrote in his Education of a Wandering Man, "Long ago I sat one day in a library where I had come upon the three volumes of E. A. Westermarck's The History of Human Marriage. Browsing through its pages, I kept chuckling and I know some other denizens of the library must have thought me off my rocker to be finding something at which to laugh in what was a dusty tome. Yet there is nothing more amusing than man and his customs, and in that case it was some studies of marriage by capture."