Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/209

Rh final conclusion upon an important question until I am satisfied that the evidence does indeed justify it. This was the case as to a possible early period of universal promiscuity, but since the publication of my Native Tribes, and in consequence of the remarkable criticisms and conclusions in Mr. Lang's Secret of the Totem, I have again gone into the whole of the evidence before me, and have come to the deliberate conclusion that it points to a period of wider license anterior to the establishment of the noa relation, and that this again must have followed a period of promiscuity.

As to the "Undivided Commune" which Mr. Thomas mentions, I incline to place it, perhaps, near the time when the "reformatory movement" of the noa relationship was brought about.

This is all that I have to say; because when one attempts to define what may have been the social conditions at a period, humanly speaking, so distant, the results cannot be better than "guess-work."

Mr. Thomas asks several questions at page 300: (1) "Has Dr. Howitt or any one else ever produced any direct evidence that people in the noa relation were ever de facto and de jure in the position of husband and wife to each other in any way in which they are not in the present time?"

I certainly have not, because I well know what the rights and restrictions of the noa relationship are. Also because such social conditions would postulate a period anterior to the existence of the noa relationship.

(2) "Has Dr. Howitt or any one else ever replied to any of the objections which have been urged against the group-marriage theory?"

Assuming that, by the "group-marriage theory," Mr. Thomas means the pirrauru system, which I have all