68 MATHEWS— NATIVE TRIBES OF VICTORIA. [March 4, 



into the cave, the warriors emerged from their hiding-place and 

 walked to the entrance, with their weapons ready for an attack. 

 When Murkupang saw them, he went through some very obscene 

 antics,^ in the hope of throwing them off their guard, so that he 

 might get a chance to strike one or both of them, but all to no 

 purpose. The warriors divested themselves of their stringybark 

 coverings, with which they stopped up the mouth of the cave. A 

 fire was then applied to this inflammable material, which made a 

 great flame and suffocated Murkupang. His spirit flew out of the 

 cave and became a Mopoke, called by the natives miimguty, a bird 

 which goes about at night. 



Sociology. 



In a former article published in 1898,^ I gave a short description 

 of the social organization of the tribes occupying the southwestern 

 districts of Victoria, but since then I have again visited the natives 

 of those localities and obtained further information which will now 

 be briefly stated. 



If we assume an approximate line drawn on the map of Victoria 

 from Geelong via Castlemaine to Pyramid Hill ; thence via Lake 

 Tyrrell to a point on the boundary between Victoria and South 

 Australia where the thirty-fifth parallel of latitude intersects it ; 

 thence along that boundary southerly to the ocean ; and thence by 

 the seacoast easterly to the point of commencement at Geelong. 

 Then the people composing all the tribes within the region thus 

 described are divided into two phratries, called respectively Guro- 

 gity and Gamaty, or dialectic variations of these names. But upon 

 making a closer examination of the constitution of these phratries, 

 we discover that the details of their composition among the tribes 

 in the northern portion of the above region differ from those in 

 the southern or coastal portion. I will first deal with the tribes 

 occupying the country north of the main dividing range, where the 

 rules of intermarriage of the phratries and the descent of the pro- 

 geny are as under : 



1 " The Nguttan Initiation Ceremony," Prog. Amer. Philos. Soc, Philadel- 

 phia, Vol. xxxvii, pp. 69-73. 



2'<The Victorian Aborigines: Their Initiation Ceremonies and Divisional 

 Systems," American Anthropologist, Vol. xi, pp. 325-343, with map of Victoria. 



