Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/542

506 have adopted the central rites. One group of such tribes, indeed, counts totemic descent on the female side; but the descent of the class name, regulating marriage, is in the father's line. Professor Spencer's map and list of tribes accompanying it are not quite complete, and do not enable us to say where all this group is located. It appears, however, to be on the River Victoria, and to be surrounded by tribes which have adopted the rites of mutilation and male descent in a more complete form.

When we turn to the tribes with milder rites we do not find the female descent of the totem invariable. Professor Spencer speaks of them all as "abnormal and modified," as no doubt they are if male descent be taken as normal. They are divided between female descent of the totem and determination of the totem otherwise than by descent. In no case is male descent the rule. The tribes of Melville and Bathurst Islands and the adjacent coast are destitute altogether of the class organization. Marriage is exogamous and governed by the totem to such an extent that some of the totem-clans have conjugal rights only with certain others of the totem-clans, while others again may intermarry with any of the totem-clans except their own. In the case of the Iwaidji, the tribe about Port Essington, they are divided into three local groups and these again into totem-clans, of which one at least of each group bears the local name. In all these tribes the descent is in the female line. The neighbouring tribe of the Kakadu and some others possess totems, but not strictly speaking totem-clans. The totem is determined by reference to that of the ancestor who is supposed to be reincarnated in the child, as among the Arunta. Unlike that tribe, however, the identity of the ancestor is revealed to the mother's husband, and the totem (which is not necessarily that of the ancestor in question) is prescribed in a dream prior to the child's birth. According to tradition these tribes are descended from Imberombera, a supernatural female who wandered over the country, leaving spirit-children at different points. These spirit-children have ever since been undergoing a series of incarnations. The localities of these spirit-children govern marriage, for a "man must take as wife a woman belonging to the same locality as that in which the man of whom he is the reincarnation and whose name he bears