an omission to recognise a relative in this manner would amount almost to an affront. Morgan also points out, as one motive for the custom, the presence of a reluctance to utter personal names. McLennan had to rely entirely on the evidence collected by Morgan, and there can be no doubt that he was greatly influenced by the stress Morgan himself laid on the function of the classificatory terms as mutual salutations. That in rude societies certain relatives have social functions definitely assigned to them by custom was known in Morgan's time, and I think it might even then have been discovered that the relationships which carried these functions were of the classificatory kind. It is, however, only by more recent work, beginning with that of Howitt, of Spencer and Gillen, and of Roth in Australia, and of the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, that the great importance of the functions of relatives through the classificatory system has been forced upon the attention of sociologists. The social and ceremonial proceedings of the Australian aborigines abound in features in which special functions are performed by such relatives as the elder brother or the brother of the mother, while in Torres Straits I was able to record large groups of duties, privileges and restrictions associated with different classificatory relationships.
Further work has shown that widely, though not universally, the nomenclature of the classificatory system carries with it a number of clearly defined
