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 allowing each set of brothers to marry each set of sisters. The only way to parry the danger was to force all these brothers and sisters to marry out of the local tribe into another local tribe with the same superstition. When that was done, the two local tribes, exogamous and intermarrying, were constituted into the two phratries of one local tribe. But that is not the theory of observers on the spot: their hypothesis is that a promiscuous and communistic local tribe, for no known or conceivable reason, bisected itself into two exogamous and intermarrying “moieties.”

On the face of it, it is a fatal objection to the theory that when men dwelt in an undivided commune they recognized no system of relationships but the classificatory, yet were well aware of consanguineous relationships; were determined to prohibit the marriages of people in such relationships; and included in the new prohibition people in no way consanguineous, but merely of classificatory kin. The reformers, by the theory, were perfectly able to distinguish consanguineous kinsfolk, so that they might easily have forbidden them to intermarry; while if all the members of the tribe were not in the classificatory degrees of relationship, who were? How were persons in classificatory relationships with each other discriminated from other members of the tribe who were not? They were easily discriminated as soon as the phratries were instituted, but, we think, not before.

Term of Classificatory Relationships.—Here it is necessary to say a few words about “classificatory” terms of relationship. Among many peoples the terms or names which with us denote relationships of consanguinity or affinity, such as Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, Son, Daughter, Husband, Wife, are applied both to the individuals actually consanguineous in these degrees, and also to all the other persons in the speaker's own main exogamous division or phratry who are of the same “age-grade” and social status as the Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, Son, Daughter, Husband, Wife, and so forth. As a man thus calls all the women whom he might legally have married by the same term as he calls his wife, and calls all children of persons of his own “age-grade,” class and status by the same name as he calls his own children, many theorists hold this to be a proof of the origin of the nomenclature “in a system of group marriage in which groups of men exercised marital rights over groups of women, and the limitation of one wife to one husband was unknown. Such a system would explain very simply why every man gives the name of wife to a whole group of women, and every woman gives the name of husband to a whole group of men,” and so on with all such collective terms of relationship.

Certainly this is a very simple explanation. But if we wished to explain why every Frenchman applies the name which he gives to his “wife” (femme) to every “woman” in the world, it would be rather simpler than satisfactory to say that this nomenclature arose when the French people lived in absolute sexual promiscuity. The same reasoning applies to English “wife,” German Weib, meaning “woman,” and so on in many languages. Moreover the explanation, though certainly very simple, is not “the only reasonable and probable explanation.” Suppose that early man, as in a hypothesis of Darwin's, lived, not in large local tribes with the present polity of such tribes in Australia, but in “cyclopean families,” where the sire controlled his female mates and offspring; and suppose that he, from motives of sexual jealousy, and love of a quiet life, forbade amours between his sons and daughters. Suppose such a society to reach the dimensions of a tribe. The rules that applied to brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, would persist, and the original names for persons in such relationships in the family would be extended, in the tribe, to all persons of the same status: new terms being adopted, or old terms extended, to cover new social relationships created by social laws in a wider society.

Another Theory of the Origin of Totemism and Exogamy.—How this would happen may be seen in studying the other hypothesis

of exogamy and totemism. Man was at first, as Darwin supposed, a jealous brute who expelled his sons from the neighbourhood of his women; he thus secured the internal peace of his fire circle; there were no domestic love-feuds. The sons therefore of necessity married out—were exogamous. As man became more human, a son was permitted to abide among his kin, but he had to capture a mate from another herd (exogamy).

The groups received sobriquets from each other, as Emu, Frog, and so forth, a fact illustrated copiously in the practice of modern and English and ancient Hebrew villages.

The rule was now that marriage must be outside of the local group-name. Frog may not marry Frog, or Emu, Emu. The usual savage superstition which places all folk in mystic rapport with the object from which their names are derived gradually gave a degree of sanctity to Emu, Frog and the rest. They became totems.

Perhaps the captured women in group Emu retained and bequeathed to their children their own group-names; the children were Grubs, Ants, Snakes, &c. in Emu group. Let two such groups, Emu and Kangaroo, tired of fighting for women, make peace with connubium, then we have two phratries, exogamous and intermarrying, Emu and Kangaroo, with totem kins within them. (Another hypothesis is necessary if the original rule of all was, as among the Urabunna and other tribes, that each totem kin must marry out of itself into only one other totem kin. But we are not sure of the fact of one totem to one totem marriage.) In short, the existence of the two main exogamous divisions in a tribe is the result of an alliance of two groups, already exogamous and intermarrying, not of a deliberate dissection of a promiscuous horde.

The first objection to this system is that it is not held by observers on the spot, such as Mr Howett and Mr Spencer. But while all the observed facts of these observers are accepted (when they do not contradict their own statements, or are not corrected by fresh observations), theorists are not bound to accept the hypotheses of the observers. Every possible respect is paid to facts of observation. Hypotheses as to a stage of society which no man living has observed may be accepted as freely from Darwin as from Howitt, Spencer and L. Morgan.

It is next objected that “the only ground for denying that the elaborate marriage-system” (systems?) “of the Australian aborigines has been devised by them for the purpose which it actually serves, appears to be a preconceived idea that these savages are incapable of thinking out and putting in practice a series of checks on marriage so intricate that many civilized persons lack, either the patience or the ability to understand them. . . The truth is that all attempts to trace the origin and growth of human institutions without the intervention of human intelligence and will are radically vicious and foredoomed to failure.” But nobody is denying that the whole set of Australian systems of marriage is the result of human emotions, intelligence and will. Nobody is denying that, in course of time, the aborigines have thought out and by successive steps have elaborated their systems. The only questions are, what were the human motives and needs which, in the first instance, set human intelligence and will to work in these directions; and how, in the first instance, did they work? The answers given to these questions are purely and inevitably hypothetical, whether given by observers or by cloistered students.

It is objected, as to the origin of totemism, that too much influence is given to accident, too little to design. The answer is that “accident” plays a great part in all evolution, and that,