acquisition of the terms which flowed trippingly from the tongues of the niitivetj became difliciilt for European b. The Kev. G. Taplin (editor of the *' South Australian Folk-Lore") exclaimed that in was ** remarkable how precisely the Aus* tralians designate relationships for which we have no dis- tinctive name." Bearing this fact in niiml, and knowing that though handed down only by oral tradition the tribal laws were implicitly obeyed, let the reader observe the accompanying tree, or intra-tribal marriage code, recorded by the good Roman Catholic missionary, Bishop Salvado, in Westerii Australia. It is selected, not as the most complicated, but as one of the simplest recorded. It may be asked whether, as some such code exists throughout the continent, it does not carry conviction with it that the tribes brought their polity from afar. That they did so, and that local changes were sometimes efTected, is more easy to beheve than that a homogeneous s^^stem was excogitated by hunckeda of tribes independently throughout the continent. " A glance at this tree, and a knowledge that generally children were betrothed to members of the permitted totemj^ within the trilie at an early age by their parents, will show j how little dependence can be placed upon the following statement in a work publislied by the Government of Vic- toria in 1878:^' A tribe is in fact an enlargement of a family circle, aud none within it can intermarry. A man must get a wife from a neighbom'ing tribe either by consent, i or by barter, or by theft/* A more erroneous statement could luirdly be inadej though it is contained hi an elaborate Introduction by the editor who probably was misled by reading that marriages were exogamous as to the totem, and imagined that they were exogamous as to the tribe. Doubtless there were marriages outside of the tribe, but they were exceptional luxuries ; arising from conquest in a | warhke raid, or, if two tribes were friendly, from barter* The Gipps* Land district, separated from the interior by the mountain-barrier of the Australian Alps, probably, as Mr. Howitt supposes, facilitated changes in custom to the full extent to which absence of hitercourse with other tribes
- ^Ix}riguies of Victoria." Edited by R. 11. Smyth.
