MARITAL JEALOUSY 223 



connection with the circumcision of children, where no 

 licentious acts are now performed, the original nature 

 of the rites is unmistakably exhibited in the dances by 

 maidens, while the young men stand by and select 

 their wives from the dancers. 1 



Returning to the continent of Australia we will con- 

 sider the sexual relations, so far as they concern the 

 present argument, of the Arunta and their neighbouring 

 tribes on either side of the Macdonnell Range. These 

 tribes are in the patrilineal stage. Their matrimonial 

 arrangements differ somewhat from those of the Dieri 

 considered on an earlier page, inasmuch as the relation 

 of pirrauru is unknown. But the appropriation of 

 a woman to one husband is hardly less qualified on 

 that account. Like the Dieri each of these central 

 tribes is divided socially into a number of groups of 

 men on the one side and of women on the other who 

 stand in the relation of unawa (Dieri, noa) or potential 

 spouses to one another. When a girl arrives at 



1 Barton, 99, 100, no, citing Doughty, Arabia Deserta, i. 340. 

 Concerning the manners of the Druses of Mount Lebanon the 

 Spanish rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Palestine in the 

 twelfth century, relates that fathers committed incest with their own 

 daughters and that once a year a festival was held at which pro- 

 miscuous intercourse took place. This was perhaps a calumny 

 (Early Trav. 80. Cf. Churchill, Mount Lebanon, ii. 1853, 238-241). 

 The Yezidis, or Devil-worshippers of Asiatic Turkey, are reported to 

 sanction unions of a kind that would be called irregular and 

 adulterous by either their Christian or their Mohammedan neigh- 

 bours. Indeed, if the admission of an attendant at the principal 

 Yezidi shrine near Mosul, made to Mr. Badger, can be relied on 

 such unions are part of their religious worship, or at least are 

 ordinary incidents in the precincts of the shrine. The admission 

 however was vague, was instantly though ambiguously denied by an 

 elder attendant, and the form of Mr. Badger's examination of the 

 witnesses as recorded by himself does not carry conviction (Badger, 

 Nestorians, i. 109). 



