Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/130

104 Our critical examination of these "rules of marriage and descent," and the fact that the four names represented four divisions of the tribe, led us to feel satisfied that they must be subdivisions of two primary classes, of whose existence in many parts of Australia we were not then aware.

It was only after long-continued inquiry that I learned through a valued correspondent, Mr. Cyrus E. Doyle, then living at Moree in the country of the northern Kamilaroi, of the existence there of the two class names, of which the four sub-class names are the subdivisions. Subsequently I found the two class names in tribes of Southern Queensland, which have descent in the male line, finally in some of the Wiradjuri tribes in Western New South Wales.

Not only was the discovery of these two primary class names important, as connecting the two-class systems with those having four sub-classes, but they afforded me the means of ascertaining with absolute certainty, in any given case where they existed, whether descent was in the male or female line. This will be further detailed in Chapter V.

The following is the complete class system of the Kamilaroi of the Gwydir river, with the exception that, as in other cases, it is not certain that the totems are numerically correct:—

Kupathin and Dilbi divide the tribal community into two moieties, just as Matteri and Kararu or any other of the pairs of class names do. Omitting for a moment the four sub-classes, there remain only the two classes, each with its group of totems, and the analogy to the two-class system is