ON THE ORGANISATION OF AUSTRALIAN TRIBES. 129 
to conceive that a savage may have inherited the relationship terms which he uses, in 
consequence of his ancestors having been in a state of society different from that of 
the existing savage tribes, much as the society of these differs from the more 
developed society of civilised peoples. 
Our own relationship terms have been developed, without doubt, in accordance 
with the development of our civilised society. If the often-quoted and often-doubted 
statement made by Julius Cesar as to the Britons (his contemporaries) is a true 
statement of their society, then there cannot be any reasonable doubt that he 
described a form of group marriage among our British ancestors—a custom which 
was almost on all fours with the practice of Australian tribes as described by Mr. 
Muirhead, in Queensland, and shown in this paper to exist in a very marked form in 
tribes having a range of a thousand miles in Central Australia. 
The white man must, therefore, not only free himself from such preconceptions 
as to the universality of the relationships which he himself recognises, but he must, 
in order to understand those recognised by the Australian blackfellow, put himself into 
the place of the latter and endeavour, with such success as he may attain to, to regard 
them from his standpoint. Unless he does this the classificatory system of 
relationships will never be more to him than a delusion and a snare. 
In endeavouring to disentangle the puzzling system of relationships of the 
Australian savage, and to offer a reasonable explanation of their origin and purpose, 
I start from the two existing fundamental inter-marrying groups. I do no more at 
this place than to note that the existence of these two groups appears to me to pre- 
suppose the previous existence of the undivided commune, whose segmentation would 
give them existence, and of whose structure each of the two groups may be thought to 
bear evidence in its own. If such an original undivided commune can be postulated, 
then it gives an explanation of some peculiar terms of relationship which occur in the 
Australian system, and which, it seems to me, it will be difficult to explain otherwise. 
It has been shown in a preceding section that the fundamental principle of aboriginal 
society in Australia is the division of the community into two exogamous inter- 
marrying moieties. Out of this division into two groups, and out of the relations thus 
created between the contemporary members of them and their descendants, the terms 
of relationship must have grown. As the two primary divisions (classes) have become 
again subdivided in the process of social development, and as the groups of 
numerous totems have been added, so has it become necessary to use new terms to 
define and distinguish the new relations thus created. On reflection, it seems to me 
quite evident that the new names must have come into existence after the new 
relations, which caused their want to be felt. _ Hence we cannot feel surprise that in 
all cases the existing system of relationship terms, to a greater or less extent, lags 
behind the existing relations. 
