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PAPERS RELATING TO ANTHROPOLOGY. 



fined to the fraternal groups, for it necessarily also affects the parental 

 and filial groups with which they are connected. These restrictions 

 arise out of the relationships resulting from the action of the laws which 

 regulate the class divisions of the community. Other equally stringent 

 restrictions are connected with the local divisions of the people. I shall 

 now briefly note what they are, and show how all these restrictions 

 affect the choice of a wife, not only within the tribe, but even beyond it 

 in neighboring tribes with which there is connubium. 



1. Prohibition arising out of the class and totem restrictions. — The pro- 

 hibition as to class divides the whole community into two halves, coin- 

 ciding with those divisions, which, for convenience of reference, I have 

 called A and B* (Table I). By this arrangement a man is restricted 

 in his choice of a wife to one-half of the community. The women of this 

 half are his potential wives, and he obtains either one or more of them 

 according to certain circumstances which limit his inherited right. In 

 some tribes the totemic regulations still further restrict his choice to 

 one totem out of as many as perhaps a dozen which compose the class. 

 As an illustration of the simpler case, I take the Wotjoballuk tribe of 

 Northwestern Victoria.t 



The social organization of this tribe is somewhat peculiar, and may 



be thus tabulated. 



Table VII. 



* I have omitted the original words as useless for my purpose. 



Descent in this class system is uterine. A and B are the two great 

 primary divisions, which, under different names, extend across the Aus- 

 tralian continent.^ The peculiarity in this Wotjoballuk system is that 

 the primary classes divide into six subclasses which are totems, and 

 that each totem class has associated with it a larger or smaller group 

 of what I have called subtotems, but which might be appropriately 

 termed pseudo-totems. They appear to me to be totems in a state of 

 development. Hot wind has at least five of them White cockatoo has 

 seventeen, and so on for the others. That these subtotems are now in 

 process of gaining a sort of independence may be shown by the folio w- 



* In many tribes, as I have already noted, A and B again divide into four subclasses, 

 e. g., the well-known Karuilaroi Ipai-Kumba (A) and Murri-Kubi (B). But since this 

 arrangement, though it extends over a vast area, is not found among the tribes spe- 

 cially dealt with in this paper, I do not take it into consideration here. 



t Wotjo=men, balluk=people. 



1 1 have now identified with each other the primary classes in their various forms 

 from Mount Gambier to near the Gulf of Carpentaria; that is to say, practically 

 across the whole north and south extent of Eastern Australia. 



