Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/203

Rh and in the flesh. I am proud to have known two such men, and to have numbered them among my friends.

In the history of the science of man the names of Howitt and Fison will be inseparably associated. It will be for others in future, better informed and perhaps more impartial than I am, to pronounce a final judgment on the value of their work as a whole. Here I will single out only what appears to me to be their most important contribution to knowledge—that is, the light which they have thrown on the systems of marriage and relationship prevalent among the Australian aborigines. These systems are of extraordinary interest not merely in themselves, but in their bearing on the history of marriage in general. For the systems agree fundamentally with those practised by races in many other parts of the world; and, though they present peculiarities which have not been discovered elsewhere, these peculiarities themselves appear to be only special developments of the general principles which underlie all the systems in question. Perhaps the most striking feature of the Australian systems is their apparent complexity combined with a logical, almost mathematical precision and regularity. Enquirers have long been divided on the question whether this feature is the result of accident or design; whether the Australian aborigines have stumbled on their systems by chance, or have gradually evolved them by conscious reflection and deliberate effort. Most of those who know these savages only by reading about them in books appear to be of opinion that their social systems, for all their appearance of complexity combined with exactness and regularity, are the result of accident, that they grew up through a fortuitous train of circumstances without any prevision or purpose on the part of those who practise them. On the other hand, most of those who are best acquainted with the Australian aborigines, not through books but through personal intercourse, appear to be of opinion that their