TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 531 
adyance into hostile country being secured by the plantation of a Roman or Latin 
colony (i.e., the construction of a fortress, peopled by soldiers) and united by a 
road to the base. The study of the Roman road system is thus very important 
from an historical and a military point of view. An account was given in 1913 
at the Birmingham Meeting of researches along the Via Appia and the Via 
Traiana, and in continuance of it the remainder of the road system of South 
Italy is now described, as the result of actual exploration on the spot, the 
line of the ancient roads being traced and followed as far as possible—an enter- 
prise not always by any means easy. 
2. Preliminary Communication on an Australian Cranium of probable 
Pleistocene Age. By Professors T. W. Eparworrn Davi, 
© MC. FA.S., and J. T. Wiuson, F\B.S: 
Professor T. W. Edgeworth David stated that the skull exhibited belonged to 
Mr. E. C. Crawford, of Greenthorpe, New South Wales, who obtained it from 
a stockman, who found it in the bed of Talgai Creek, near Clifton, on the 
Darling Downs of Queensland. It appears to have been washed out of the 
black soils of the Darling Downs. A few miles from the spot where the skull 
was picked up bones of many types of extinct mammalia of Pleistocene Age 
have been discovered, and as the present skull is in at least as advanced a stage 
of fossilisation as the bones of Diprotodon, Nototherium, etc., in adjacent 
regions, it may provisionally be assumed that this human skull is also of Pleisto- 
cene Age. The distortion caused by steady pressure due to the weight of an 
original thick overburden of clay is in harmony with the evidence as to the 
high antiquity of the skull. i 
While there is a strong probability of this fossil skull being of Pleistocene 
Age, perhaps early Pleistocene, its exact age obviously cannot be determined 
until further evidence can be adduced which may directly connect it with the 
mammalian bone-bearing clays of the Darling Downs. Certainly it is far older 
than any aboriginal skulls that have ever been obtained in Australasia, and it 
proves that in Australia man attained to geological antiquity. 
TUESDAY, AUGUST 25. 
Discussion on the Study of Native Culture in relation to Administra- 
tion, opened by Dr, A. C. Happon, F.R.S. 
The following Papers were then read :— 
1. Gerontocracy and. Marriage in Australia. 
By Dr. W, H. R, Rivers, F.R.S. 
Certain peculiar forms of marriage which occur in Melanesia, such as 
marriage with the granddaughter of the brother, with the wife of the mother’s 
brother, and with the wife of the father’s father, are capable of explanation 
as the result of a state of dominance of the old men, which allowed them to 
monopolise all the young women of the community.? Since Australia furnishes 
an example of a gerontocracy in which the old men are known to monopolise 
the young women, we should expect to find these peculiar marriages in 
Australia, Until now, however, only one has been recorded, the Dieri marrying 
the granddaughter of the brother,? but Baldwin Spencer has recently recorded 
others in the Northern Territory... Wives are transferred to the sisters’ sons 
(as well as to the sons) in the Kakadu tribe, while nearly all the systems of 
relationship collected in the Northern Territory show the presence of marriage 
with the wife of the father’s father, sometimes combined, as in Melanesia, with 
* Rivers, History of Melanesian Society, Cambridge, 1914. 
* Howitt, Native Tribes of South-Hast Australia, pp. 164, 177. 
* Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia, 1914. 
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