146 president's address — section g. 



clearer by seeing how laws begin in their simplest forms, 

 framed to meet the needs of savage and barbaric tribes." 



To illustrate this, I may point to the astonishing light 

 which present day custom, now discoverable in savage tribes, 

 throws upon ancient history. Thus, the late Mr. J. F. 

 M'Lennan pointed out that the totem explains many of the 

 Greek legends — such as the hunting of the Kalydonian 

 boar ; the oracle enjoining Adrastus to give his daughters in 

 marriage, one to a boar, the other to a lion, asd many other 

 instances. I shall probably startle some of you if I say 

 that the local and the social organisations of our own Aus- 

 tralian aborigines have thrown much light upon vexed 

 questions connected Avith Attic society — upon the deme 

 and the phratry, the genos, the status of aliens, and even 

 upon the Areiopagus itself: yet such is the undoubted 

 fact. For, to quote fi'om an article by my friend and 

 fellow-worker, Mr. Howitt, and myself, " It can be shown 

 that Athenian society was built upon an old foundation, 

 Avhose outlines, and even whose inner dividing lines coincide 

 substantially with those of savage society, and these lines 

 can still be distinctly traced. The stately edifice of civilisa- 

 tion reared itself upon them, and it was their arrangement 

 which determined its general form." Even to theology 

 itself this line of inquiry ministers, and the student of Old 

 Testament history will find himself wonderfully helped by it. 

 Our own modern civilisation, too, is full of fossilised 

 anomalies, which by the aid of savage custom can be traced 

 back to a time when they were full of life. Thus, if Buckle 

 had studied savage life and custom before he began to write 

 his pretentious book, he would never have called pride of birth 

 a mere " ecstacy of the fancy." He would have seen that it 



is not 



" a false creation, 

 Proceeding from the over-heated brain," 



but a direct inheritance — a " survival in culture " (to use Dr. 

 Tylor's apt phrase) of an old savage notion which, however 

 absurd it may be among ourselves, was perfectly reasonable 

 in its day, when the man who was not both freeborn and 

 fuUborn had only a very inferior status in the community, 

 while he who was neither one nor the other had positively 

 no status at all. So also the crests of our armorial bearings 

 have little or no meaning to us now, but they can be traced 

 back to a time when they represented the ancient totem, 

 which had a powerful function in the older of the old com- 



