Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/196

166 and Kurnai (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane, 1880) the joint results of their enquiries and reflections, Mr. Howitt pursued his investigations for the most part alone; indeed, even before the publication of that book, Mr. Fison had returned to Fiji. Some of the results of these investigations were given to the world in a long series of valuable memoirs on the Australian tribes, which appeared for the most part in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland from the year 1883 to the year 1907. They opened with a joint paper by Messrs. Fison and Howitt, called "From Mother-Right to Father-Right," and they closed with one by Dr. Howitt on "Australian Group-Relationships." In this series an early one, entitled "Notes on the Australian Class Systems," read in the author's absence before the Anthropological Institute in London on December 12th, 1882, is second to none in importance for its clear enunciation of the principles underlying the seemingly complex marriage system of the Australian aborigines.

Strangely enough, when many years later he came to write his great work The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, Dr. Howitt had forgotten his own enunciation of these important principles; for it was only after a conversation with me at my house in Cambridge, in the summer of 1904, that he inserted a statement of them in his book, which was then going through the press. With characteristic candour he accepted the principles as true and assigned the discovery of them to me. It was not till January 2nd, 1908, that I detected our joint mistake; for on that day, reading again Dr. Howitt's old paper "Notes on the Australian Class Systems," I found that in it he had clearly and concisely stated the principles in question many years before I had ever given a thought to the subject. As I had certainly studied