1900. ] MATHEWS—THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES. 571 
tribes assemble at a common meeting ground and that the men of a 
distant tribe take charge of the novices of another people who are 
more or less strangers to them. We also observe that the novices 
are taken away from their mothers at daylight, the time that an ab- 
original tribe always makes an attack on an enemy. The mothers 
of the boys are led to believe that an enemy really comes into the 
camp and bears off their sons in a mysterious manner. The women 
are prevented from seeing what actually takes place, owing to their 
being hidden under grass, bushes, rugs, bark, or other covering, 
but they hear what they believe to be the awful voice of the enemy 
and the trampling of his heavy footsteps. 
In describing the Kamilaroi Bora I have stated that great sexual 
license is permitted to the men of the visiting tribes. In ordinary 
everyday life a man is restricted to women of a certain section or 
totem, but at meetings for initiation purposes these rules are much 
relaxed, and a man is allowed to have intercourse with women of 
different sections and degrees of affinity, who would be altogether 
forbidden to him on other occasions. At the Bora ceremonies, as 
soon as the novices and all their own men are out of sight, some 
men of the strange tribes remove the covering from off the women 
and take them away to another camp, where the men remain with 
them for the purpose of superintending the due performance of all 
the tribal regulations. The women are, in effect, prisoners during 
these proceedings. 
All these elements of the ceremonial may be emblematical or com- 
memorative of an earlymorning raid of one hostile tribe upon another 
in the distant past, one detachment of the men taking charge of the 
women, while another detachment takes the youths away to be in- 
structed in the customs and traditions of their conquerors. The com- 
parison becomes all the more realistic when we discover that during 
their sojourn in the bush with the old men the youths are shown many 
things which are entirely new to them. They are taught another 
language, known only to the initiated, which may be typical of the 
language of their subjugators; and even their own personal name 
is changed to another, which is kept a secret from their mothers 
and sisters and all the women of the tribe. 
In native warfare, as already stated, the women are always pre- 
served and taken as wives by the victorious party. The sexual 
1 Several of the vanquished party usually escape by flight; they are chiefly 
active men, but young women often get away with them. 
PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXIX. 164. LL. PRINTED DEC. 5, 1900. 
