Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/772

758 all the female relatives of his bride's family by the products of his skill and industry in hunting and fishing for a year. He is the general protector of the girl's family, and especially of the girl, whose bower and pelican-skin couch he shares, "not as husband, but as continent companion," for a year. If all goes well, he is then permanently received as "consort-guest," and his children are added to the clan of his mother-in-law. With few exceptions, descent was formerly reckoned in Australia in the female line, and the usage survives in some regions. Howitt, in a letter to Professor Tylor, reports of the tribes near Maryborough, Queensland:

In Australia there is also a very sharp social expression of the fact of sex in the division of the group into male and female classes in addition to the division into clans. In the Malay archipelago the same system is found.