Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/293

Rh by the female side is taken into account. One effect of the division of clans in this way, is that the children of the same father by different wives, having different names, may be obliged to take opposite sides in a quarrel. Mr. Eyre's experience in South Australia does not, however, correspond with Sir George Grey's in the West and North-West. Collins believed the custom to be for a native to steal a wife from a tribe at enmity with his own, and to drag her, stunned with blows, home through the woods; her relations not avenging the affront, but taking an opportunity of retaliating in kind. It appears from Nind's account, that in some districts the population is divided into two clans, and a man of one clan can only marry a woman of another. In East Australia, Lang describes a curious and complex system. Through a large extent of the interior, among tribes speaking different dialects, there are four names for men, and four for women, Ippai and Ippata, Kubbi and Kapota, Kumbo and Buta, Murri and Mata. If we call these four sets A, B, C, D, then the rule is that a man or woman of the tribe A must marry into B, and a member of the tribe C into D, and vice versâ, but the child whose father is A, takes the name of D, and so on; A's = D; B's = C; C's = B; D's = A; and the mother's name answers equally well to give the name of the child, if the mother is of the tribe B, her child will belong to the tribe D, and so on.

This ingenious arrangement, it will be seen, has much the same effect as the Hindoo regulations in preventing intermarriage in the male or female line, but allowing the male and female line to cross; the children of two brothers or two sisters cannot marry, but the brother's child may marry the sister's. Lang, however, mentions a furthur regulation, probably made to meet some incidental circumstances, as, so far as it goes, it stultifies the whole system; A may also marry into his or her own tribe, and the children take the name of C.

In America, the custom of marrying out of the clan is frequent and well marked. More than twenty years ago, Sir George Grey called attention to the division of the Australians into