Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/353

 Australian Marriage Customs. 317

legal system. He himself admits that noa means " marriageable " ; it is expressive of status, not of actual marital relations (though it includes these) ; and that is what I mean by the term " legal " ; what Dr. Howitt thinks I meant is a mystery to me.

Again, on p. 176, Dr. Howitt says I have not mastered the evidence as to pirraurtL and tippa-malhi, because I say that both are entered upon by individuals, etc. All I mean by this is that a man (so far as I can see) gets, or may get, his pirratint, spouses one by one, not as a group ; I do not assert that he has not more than one pirrauru, as Dr. Howitt could easily have seen by several passages (see p. 299, where I speak of pirrauru as a combination of polyandry and polygyny, an impossible remark if I did not recognise that there are several pirratirits to each individual).

To sum up: (i) Dr. Howitt admits having made an error of fundamental importance in the matter of pirraunt ; even now we have no clear statement as to how many ways exist of becoming pirraunt or of entering into individual marriage ; so far as I can make out there are four of each.

(2) Dr. Howitt denies the validity of my assertion that he wrongly put maian-bra on a level with pirraitrii ; I show that I am entirely justified in my contention.

(3) Dr. Howitt throws over all that he has said in his book about kandri, and brings it into relation with individual marriage, unless his whole point in his present remarks is, as I suspect, entirely erroneous.

(4) He speaks oi pirraurii as group-marriage, and argues as if the group in question were made up of all the noa ; he alternately asserts and denies that «c«-group-marriage existed, and where he asserts it he speaks of it as pirraiiriL. His terminology seems to be hopelessly inadequate.

(5) He will not permit me to select my terms and