Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/81

 Rh binds together in a common tie the fighting and hunting force of any community in a manner and to an extent generally unknown where mother-right prevails. A man as a rule takes his wife with him; he does not go to live with her. In mother-right this tends to scatter the kin; in father-right it tends to consolidate the kin with the local group. This tendency, it will be easily understood, contributes in no small measure to strengthen the organisation of the local group in its struggle for life. Consequently, it is not surprising to find that most aggressive and progressive communities have, at one stage in their career, been organised on the basis of agnation.

A few years ago Mr. Howitt mapped out these changes among the Australian tribes according to geographical areas as far as he was then able to trace them; and his investigations led to significant results. He found that: "The most backward-standing types of social organisation, having descent through the mother and an archaic communal marriage, exist in the dry and desert country; the more developed Kamilaroi type, having descent through the mother, but a general absence of the Pirauru marriage practice [a relic of communal or group-marriage] is found in the better watered tracts which are the sources of all the great rivers of East Australia; while the most developed types, having individual marriage, and in which in almost all cases descent is counted through the father, are found along the coasts where there is the most plentiful supply of water and most food. In fact, it is thus suggested that the social advance of the Australian aborigines has been connected with, if not mainly due to a more plentiful supply of food in better watered districts."

To the list of tribes given by Mr. Howitt must now be added the Arunta. The districts inhabited by the Arunta and their allied tribes, though dry, are rather to be