Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/442

 4o6 Lord Avehury on Marriage,

among themselves. But, when men took to capturing women within their own tribe, the tribe would be broken up by internal blood-feuds. A tribe which practised, as a rule, capture of brides within the tribe would be weakened by internal dispeace. If Lord Avebury means that his tribes were "very small communities," capture within these would break them up entirely.

Moreover, exogamy has nothing to do, in Australia, with marriage out of the local tribe. Choice in marriage is regulated, as M. Salomon Reinach objects,^ by " clan," (totem kin); or, more properly speaking, by phratry and matrimonial classes, where these exist. Lord Avebury "fails to understand" the objection of M. Reinach, but to myself it seems intelligible and valid.

It is Lord Avebury 's affair, I think, to show, step by step, how marriage by capture, out of the tribe, and marriage by capture, within the tribe, evolved the actual rules of marriage outside of the phratry, and, necessarily, out of the totem-kin. I do not find that Lord Avebury has followed the evolution step by step. He takes the case of the Buandik (formerly called Mount Gambler) tribe. Here the phratries, as is very common in South East and South West Australia, are named Black Cockatoo (Kumit) and White Cockatoo (Kroki). Mr. Howitt gives four totems confined to the former, and five different totems confined to the latter phratry. Each phratry has a totem-kin of its own name-giving fowl, Cockatoo, within it, as is usual.

How does Lord Avebury explain these facts } He does not attempt, here, to explain all of them. He postulates two original neighbouring tribes, one called White Cockatoo (Kroki), the other Black Cockatoo (Kumit).*" But where, in Australia, does he find tribes called by names of animals.? Such names are held by many phratries, by many totem- kins, by some matrimonial classes, but not by tribes. How- ever, let it be so, — there were two small neighbouring

'Avebury, p. 75, ^He writes " Krumite."