Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/142

 would impair tradition. Yet in Gipps' Land none could marry a person of his own totem.

Differing in detail, the marriage laws of Australia are one in principle, and barred promiscuous intercourse or incest. Implicitly obeyed, and much too intricate to have been devised by a race defective in mental gifts, they either prove its capacity for legislation, or else that it imported its ceremonial law as other wanderers or conquerors have carried theirs within the range of authentic history.

To imagine that the Kurnai tribe invented a complicated system in order to relieve themselves from a difficulty in which it is gratuitously supposed that they were placed, is to invent a problem for the sake of a theory. No evidence is discoverable to warrant the setting aside the account given by the natives themselves. Their law was handed down from their forefathers, treasured unchanged, obeyed by all without demur, and no instance was known in which passion stirred a member of a tribe to defy the law by