Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/206

174 Dieri rule incapacitates those who under the other rule would be eligible, and only permits marriage between their children.

The prohibition of the Dieri rule accords in principle with all those other similar limitations which I have already referred to. I will only add that whenever the noa relation of the Dieri was established, it must have been to restrict a rule like that of the Urabunna.

There is a passage at page 296 which seems to show that Mr. Thomas has not mastered the facts of the noa relation or of the pirrauru relation which follows it. He says: "The classificatory system … is essentially a legal system; the terms which a boy applies to his father … he also applies to a number of other men, any of whom was eligible to marry his mother. …"

I have pointed out how, by the pirrauru marriage, certain of the husband's brothers become also the fathers of his wife's children. I consider pirrauru to be a survival from a period of wider license, having been restricted by the noa relationship.

On this view the application of the term ngaperi to the other brothers who have not become pirrauru, appears to be a vestigiary survival of a term which once denoted a fact; and this would be analogous to the application of the Kurnai term breppa-mungan, but with this difference, that while the Dieri term must be held to date back to a time anterior to the establishment of pirrauru, the Kurnai term, as I see it, would point back to a period when the Kurnai ancestors had a system of marriage like that of pirrauru.

I find at page 297 the following passage:

"… Dr. Howitt asserts a correspondence in meaning and use between pirrauru (Dieri) and maian-bra (Kurnai). … But in point of fact no such correspondence exists. Maian-bra corresponds not to pirrauru but to noa; they do not imply sexual relations between