Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/80

 70 present organisation? And the Arunta belief may a least count for something as evidence of progress. What that evidence amounts to, having pointed it out, I am content for others to value. We shall be on surer ground if we turn to the organisation and institutions of the tribes.

Most of the Australian communities whose organisation is known have been found divided into two exogamous groups. Men, that is, are not allowed to take their wives from the group into which they themselves were born, but from the complementary group. Mr. Howitt, than whom there is no more competent living authority, considers that these two groups were originally totem-clans, or, as he would say, totem-hordes. The right of marriage is still further restricted by an ingenious system of classification, which has the effect, where it is most fully developed, of completely preventing the intermarriage of near kin. I will not try now to explain this system (known as the class-system), but I may say that it offers the most complicated puzzle that savage institutions have ever offered to civilised inquirers; and that is saying a great deal. In what appears to be the oldest form of the organisation, it is accompanied by the reckoning of kinship and descent through the mother only—what we call Mother-right. Moreover, there is reason to believe that individual marriage was formerly unknown: groups of men and women possessed and exercised conjugal rights in common. Unmistakable relics of this condition still exist; but gradually a double transformation has taken place in many of the tribes. Group-marriage has been giving way to individual marriage; and Mother-right has yielded to Father-right, or Agnation, the tracing of descent through the father only. What may be the object of the change from mother-right to father-right, and whether that object was one consciously pursued, are questions I cannot now discuss. One effect, however, of the change is to localise the group or clan which adopts father-right, for it