Ontutored Man. 313 
is covered with blood; at ten to fourteen, he is circumcised 
in the north and south of Australia, but not in the west or on 
the Murray River; and at twenty, he is tattooed or scarred. 
Felicity after death is the reward of proper burial, but a man 
dying in battle or rotting in a field becomes an evil genius. 
No more perfect example of tribal organization exists than 
that ofthe tribes of Australasia. In a very large proportion 
of existing tribes, the tribe is an aggregate of several stocks 
or distinct bodies of kindred, the persons composing the tribes 
being included in stocks which are, or are accounted, distinct 
from each other. Two tribal customs, namely, the prohibi- 
tion of marriage between persons of the same stock, and the 
reckoning of kinship through females only, so that children 
are accounted of the stock of their mother, sustain this or- 
ganization. Persons of the same stock, too, owe duties to 
each other, and are to some extent participants in each other’s 
liabilities. An injury done by aman is an injury done by his 
stock, which may be avenged upon any member thereof; or 
an injury done to a man is an injury done by his stock, 
for which every member of it is bound to seek ven- 
geance. As a consequence of these customs, a husband 
must be of a different stock from his wife or wives, and there- 
fore must be accounted ofa different stock from his children; 
and if he has wives of different stocks, then their respective 
children are accounted of different stocks. More than one 
stock, it will thus be perceived, is represented in every house- 
hold. And since a man owes duties to his stock—the duties 
of acknowledged blood-relationship—while to those of his 
family who are not of his stock, there being nothing but the 
accident of birth to unite him, it necessarily follows that the 
family among these tribes has very little cohesion. 
Wholly sensuous is the language of the Australian, their 
abstraction-tending only in the way of arithmetic as far as 
the number five, and that itself being quite an unusual 
stretch. Polysyllabic as it is in formation, and having: the 
accent on the penultimate, it is not at all inharmonious. 
