Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/273

Rh Sister, and (both man and woman speaking) Brother's Wife; but for the sake of certainty they should not have been forgotten. Luia (man speaking) has also dropped out of the table of the Warramunga tribe. In the table of descent of the Arunta tribe No. 26 should be markedm., not f., and in the explanation on p. 81, the numbers 32 and 33 have been misplaced; the former should be opposite Umbirna and the latter opposite Unawa.

It is in the totemic arrangements, the ceremonies and the traditions of the Alcheringa, that the Arunta and allied tribes differ so remarkably from the rest of Australia, so far as is known. "Every Arunta native thinks that his ancestor in the Alcheringa [the far distant past with which the earliest traditions of the tribe deal] was the descendant of the animal or plant, or at least was immediately associated with the object the name of which he bears as his totem." But he bears this totem-name not because his mother or his father belonged to the totem, but because he is a new-birth of somebody in the Alcheringa who bore the totem-name.

Descent among the Arunta is said to be in the male line. This needs some elucidation. It is not counted for the purpose of reckoning the totem. Nor is it counted exclusively in one line for the purposes of marriage, since marriage is arranged according to the group- or class-system. "A Bukhara man marries a Kumara woman, and their children are Panunga; a Purula man marries a Panunga woman, and their children are Kumara; a Panunga man marries a Purula woman, and their children are Bukhara; a Kumara man marries a Bukhara woman, and their children are Purula." These rules know no exception, and the class or group to which any individual belongs is thus determined by the classes of both his father and mother. Among the Pittapitta, of whom Mr. Roth has written, descent, as the authors of this book note, is reckoned through the mother, for certain purposes at all events, as in the sub-class Ootaroo or Pakoota, to which everybody belongs by virtue of his mother belonging to it, in the right to dispose in marriage of his sister by the same mother, and presumably (though this is not quite clear) in the prohibition (over and above all other prohibitions) of marriage between blood-relations. Among the Arunta, the first and third of these purposes do not appear to be reported. With regard to the second the rule is quite different. A father of a boy will arrange with the father of a girl that the latter shall become