Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/262

224 have not "abandoned the class system for organization based on locality." With female kin they cannot do so.

"The most cruel and outrageous practices at initiation are unknown" to South-Eastern tribes with the All-Father belief. But this does not prove that such rites have been dropped by them. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen indicate more than once their belief, which is mine, that the South-Eastern rites are the most pristine, and that the more ferocious rites of the North and Centre are later additions to these. They are unpleasant examples of social advance. Thus the All-Father belief, though a socially advanced tribe may hold it, is, in Australia, very conspicuous among tribes so archaic as to reckon descent as on the spindle side; and so arriérés as not to have developed the more outrageous rites and Intichiuma.

In associating the All-Father belief, causally, with advance in social organization, Mr. Howitt has overlooked his own valuable collection of social facts. Any one who wishes to verify my remarks has only to look up "All-Father" in Mr. Howitt's Index, and then compare his account of the social condition of tribes with an All-Father. The belief is common to most both of the more and less socially advanced tribes of the South-East: and is reported as absent among almost all the socially advanced Northern and Central tribes with local organization. In my opinion they have almost sloughed off the belief, not because they are socially advanced, but for a totally different reason.

May I add that in reviewing the accounts of Fan belief by Messrs. Allégret and Nassau, in Folk-Lore for March, I omitted to mention the similar statements as to Angambi (Nyambe), the Fan-Father (Tata) who "made all things" (a bo mam merere), published by Dr. Bennett in J.A.I., (N.S. 1. 2, p. 85). I do not know whether Dr. Bennett is or is not a missionary.

In my parish, Cadney, Lincolnshire, a peat bank, near a drain, was fired by a thrown-away match in August, 1902. It