Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/342

 AUSTRALIAN MARRIAGE CUSTOMS.

BY N. W. THOMAS.

To deal seriatim with Dr. Howitt's defence of his position would, I fear, not make for enlightenment, at any rate so far as the casual reader is concerned. I continue the controversy, it is true, more in the hope of eliciting further facts from Dr. Howitt than for any other reason. I have already elicited from him (1) an admission that he has been guilty of a fundamental error in his account of pirrauru in N.T.S.E.A. and (2) the admission that the Kurnai terms maian and bra are not, as he has hitherto implied, strictly analogous to noa.

To reply in full to Dr. Howitt, and in particular to clear up all the errors into which he has fallen regarding my meaning, would be impossible. I can only ask him to read my remarks in the light of my definitions, not of his own. As I shall show below, his own terminology is extraordinarily lax, and to this is due such small confusions as I have fallen into.

It will be convenient to take in order the various points raised by Dr. Howitt's paper and to deal in succession with (1) questions of terminology, and in connection with it (2) Dr. Howitt's theory of social evolution, then (3) the origin of marital terms and the meaning of (4) maian-bra and (5) kandri, and (6) the area in which the pirrauru custom is found. I will then deal briefly with one or two subsidiary points.

Dr. Howitt gives the following summary of limitations