16 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. 



organisation and the customs and beliefs of Australian tribes, 

 for which I have been engaged in collecting material for 

 many years, both personally and through correspondents in 

 the greater parts of Australia. These materials remain still 

 in a great measure unused, but I am at present unable to 

 form any opinion as to when the time may come in which 

 the pressure of official duties will permit of my devoting the 

 necessary leisure, not only to the condensation and arrange 

 ment of my own data, but also to the condition of the great 

 mass of material in other works to which I have referred. 



In this address I do not propose to enter upon any general 

 review of the science of Anthropology in its Australian aspect, 

 but to confine myself to tracing out briefly the progress and 

 present position of that part to which my own special atten- 

 tion has been devoted — namely, the probable origin and 

 development of social institutions. In this study, the origin 

 and development of the family forms an essential element. 



In investigations such as these, the white man who has 

 been born and bred and trained in the ways of civilisation is 

 at a disadvantage, unless he has had such intimate intercourse 

 with savages as to enable him to place himself more or less 

 in their mental standpoints, to see as they see, and to reason 

 as they reason. Few white men have been in that position, 

 and yet fewer of those have been competent to avail them- 

 selves of their opportunities. 



Buckley and Morell, who will serve for examples, lived for 

 years with Australian tribes, and they show how white men 

 under such circumstances may not only descend nearly to 

 the level of the savage, but after again rejoining their own 

 people, are unable to give even as clear an account of the 

 Aboriginal societj^, of which they formed a part, as an 

 average blackfellow. So far as one can ascertain, they 

 appear to have been quite ignorant of even the rules which 

 govern the intermarrying classes of the community. Even 

 educated men, with more or less scientific training, do not, 

 as it would seem, always see matters which must have been 

 directly within their view. I was struck by this when 

 reading a late and interesting work by the naturalist 

 Lumholz, on the "Aborigines of the Herbert River in Eastern 

 Queensland." I observed that even he, after some four years 

 of more or less intimate acquaintance with those people, does 

 not seem to have seen much below the surface. He makes 

 no mention of the laws governing their society, as regards 

 marriage, nor does he seem to have seen or to have had des- 



