Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/385

Rh purchase was the rule, and the value of the lady was variously rated at that of a canoe, a necklace of dog's teeth, or, in 1849, a glass bottle. The husband was bound to pay his wife's relatives for each child born to him. Possibly this is evidence of the prior matrilineal stage.

Dr. Rivers gives an excellent discussion of marriage regulations in section nine. On the whole intra-clan marriage was exceedingly rare, and seems to have been possible only when the subsidiary totems were different. Marriage between near kin was unknown, and very rare between remote kin. The evidence goes to show, however, that there was a differentiation in respect of the same legal degree of kinship, dependent possibly on a former identity of kinship and clanship. It is a worse offence to marry a babat of the same than of another clan.

The funeral ceremonies are described for each locality sepatately. In Mabuiag the thumbs and great toes of the corpse were tied together, and it was sewn up in a mat. It was then carried out of the camp feet foremost, so that the ghost might not come back to trouble the survivors. A curious feature was that the mariget, who performed the funeral ceremonies, &c., must be of another clan to the dead man. The body was placed on a sara, and the friends of the deceased summoned by pantomime, the movements of the totem of the dead man being imitated; they brought bows and arrows, and shot at both the sara and the mariget. These latter are stated to have been shot at because it was assumed they injured the corpse, but it seems possible that the original idea was that of driving away the soul who is near them. After much lamentation the garden of the deceased was devastated, and this closed the first day of mourning. After an interval of several days his relatives returned and beat the sara to drive away the ghost ("to drive rest of devil out"), and the head and lower jaw were placed in an ant's nest. When the bones were bare, the wife or other near relative wrapped them up and deposited them in a crevice in the rocks. The skull was decorated and handed to the nearest relatives.

We pass over some interesting sections on Public Life, Morals, Personal Names, Land Tenure, Trade, and Warfare, and come to Magic and Religion.

Elaborate ceremonies were necessary to prepare a canoe for turtle-fishing, and the dugong and sawfish were also objects of