Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/526

490 them would not cause strife nor tend to break up the community. Moreover, if the new rule has the effect of keeping mothers from sons, brothers from sisters, why was it made as it is, on these lines? Manifestly because of a previous objection to these unions, and what was the cause of that objection? The union of brother and sister did no harm to the horde, that I can see. The peace which it broke was that of the family circle, which, in the conditions of Australia, lives much apart, and only meets the tribe on rare occasions. It appears to me that what Mr. Hartland's horde, "with the desire for a more or less durable possession" in "the rude beginnings of marriage," and "to prevent unnecessary strife," needed, was a law against adultery, not a law against incest. But the primary phratriac rule does not prevent adultery. It does prevent, not only mother to son and brother to sister unions, but large numbers of non-consanguineous unions, a rule which no community was likely to devise. People glided into it by a blunder, on my theory as on any theory, but by my theory the blunder caused no loss, in facility of wiving, to the men who made it.

Certainly "voluntary changes" have been made in the Australian tribes, and that in the matter of "fission," but these changes, in my view, were made on the model of the phratries, which I take to have been the result of a series of combinations beginning with the one totem to one totem rule. How else can you explain that rule? Mr. Hartland now recognises the importance of the totem names (p. 370). As far as I see we only differ in that he holds the groups which became totemic to have split off from the horde, locally; while I take them to have combined into the tribe, by a rather slow and easily traceable process of evolution. In several cases tribal legend speaks of exogamous fissions in the tribe being made, but, for all that I know, the legends are hypo- theses. It does appear to me that, if the consanguinity of mother and children were recognised, the relation of mothers' children to each other could not have escaped notice. They were known, as in their Greek name, to be "of one womb."

I hold with Mr. Hartland that "the regulations were originally made knowingly, voluntarily, and for a purpose," namely by the sire in the camp; to secure the family peace; and also from