their enquiries as far as possible through personal intercourse with the natives, but also partly by correspondence; for they printed and circulated widely through the principal Australian settlements a list of questions touching the tribal organisation and systems of consanguinity and affinity of the aborigines. Thus they accumulated a large body of facts illustrating many phases of savage life, and exhibiting some of the fundamental institutions of the Australian tribes. The results of these enquiries, carried on for some years, were published jointly by the two friends in their well-known work Kamilaroi and Kurnai (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane, 1880), so named after the two tribes, one in New South Wales, the other in Victoria, to which the authors had paid special attention. This important work, for which Lewis H. Morgan wrote an appreciative preface,[1] unquestionably laid the foundations of a scientific knowledge of the Australian aborigines, and its value in setting forth the wonderful social system, seemingly complex, confused, and casual, yet really clear, logical, and purposeful, of these savages, can hardly be overestimated. Viewed both in itself and in the light of the subsequent researches to which it gave birth, especially those of Spencer and Gillen in Central Australia, Kamilaroi and Kurnai is a document of primary importance in the archives of anthropology.
Not that all its theories have stood the test of time. Mr. Fison himself, with admirable candour, announced publicly from his presidential chair at a meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, that an elaborate theory which he had propounded in that book was "not worth a rush." As the words in which he did so are not only highly characteristic of the man,
- ↑ Mr. Fison had previously contributed information to L. H. Morgan's last book, Ancient Society (London, 1877), pp. 51, 403, etc. From one of Morgan's references to him (op. cit., p. 403, note 1), it appears that Mr. Fison had been at one time resident at Sydney.
