Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/350

 322 quarrels are intensified by the belief in sorcery, and the dread of its exercise without any known provocation. It is, therefore, anything but superfluous to impress on the novice the importance of politeness, and of repressing his self-assertive and quarrelsome instincts. As Mr. Palmer reports the instruction among the tribes about the Cloncurry and the Flinders in northern Australia, "he is to be silent and not given to quarrelling He is led to consider himself responsible for good conduct to the tribe, its ancient traditions, and its elders." Observe, not to the "Supreme Being." The ethics inculcated are the rudiments of social order.

On the fourth precept, "Not to interfere with girls or married women," Mr. Lang ejaculates "Seventh Commandment." Really one would suppose he had never heard of the sexual arrangements of the Australian aborigines. So complex a subject cannot be fully explained in a few lines; happily there are few anthropological students who are unacquainted with it. It is enough for our purpose to say that in earlier times the domestic condition was that of marriage, if marriage it may be called, of both man and woman to a group. From this it was everywhere passing, or had passed, before the advent of Europeans, to the individual appropriation by the stronger and older men of as many wives as they could severally manage. But even the most powerful man was not unrestricted in his choice of wives. They must be selected among women not belonging to his own clan, or to his birth-division, often called "class." This was a restriction he could not infringe without incurring the penalty of death, or becoming an outcast: a restriction, moreover, regarded with feelings akin to those with which we regard incest. The restriction had the twofold effect of limiting the possibilities of quarrelling over the women, and of preventing to some extent inbreeding. Yet it is quite