36 Annual Address. [Feb. 



'' Thus, for example, in this part of Indo-China still persists, amongst 

 tlie Oaros, Kasias and the wilder Koch tribes, that once widespread 

 stage of primitive society, about which so little is knowMi — the ' maternal ' 

 — in which descent is traced through the mother, and not through the 

 father, as in civilized society, thus implying a somew^hat promiscuous 

 state of the family. Others again, sucli as the Miris, are in a transition- 

 stage from the maternal to the paternal. They retain survivals of the 

 maternal stage ; but appear only recently to have adopted the paternal. 

 For, as if to emphasise the change and to show that the father has a 

 direct relation to his child, the father is represented as a second mother 

 and goes through the fiction of a mock child-birth, the so-called couvade. 

 He lies in bed for forty days, after the bii'th of his child ; and during this 

 period he is fed as an invalid. The Kulis and ' Kacha ' Nagas seem 

 also to be more or less in this transition-stage while the other Naga 

 tribes appear to be in a more communal state, the exact nature of 

 which, however, as well as its relation to the others, is not yet clear. 

 And adjoining tribes practise polyandry, polygamy, and the Levirate." 



I should like to commend this sketch of the material awaiting the 

 ethnologist in Assam to the notice of my friend Mr. Andiew Lang, who 

 said to me in England the other day, " You have got nothing primitive 

 in India." One may faiil}^ ask in i*eply what is it that entitles people 

 to pose as primitive ? If dispensing witli clothes is the test we may 

 point to the 'naked' tribe of Nagas described by Mr. Davis, who are 

 nude and antique enough to satisfy anybody ; to the Juangs of 

 Keanjhar, whose women until quite recently wore nothing but a couple 

 of bunches of leaves stuck under a girdle of beads ; and to the curious 

 survival mentioned by Mr. Clayton in Part III. of the Journal for last 

 year, where he describes how at the temple of the goddess Bavaniyam- 

 mal, in a village only sixteen miles from Madras, the worshippers, 

 including Brahmans and the respectable agricultural caste of Vellalas 

 strip themselves naked and circumambulate the shrine clad only in 

 leaves of the sacred neem tree {Azadirachta ludica). If eccentric modes 

 of marriage are the point to be looked to, we have in India a large and 

 varied selection embracing both forms of polyandry, the fraternal and 

 the promiscuous, the latter of which has given rise in Malabar and in 

 the north of Ceylon to an elaborate law of property under which 

 a man's proximus haeres is his sistei*'s son. In Bengal an equally 

 elaborate law has arisen from a system of ancestor worship, none the 

 less primitive for the fact that its development, so far from being 

 arrested, seems to have been stimulated by the fostering care of the 

 Privy Council. Exoganjy prevails everywhere in forms which are 

 instructive for their variety and for the light which they throw upon 



