dam and colt in
the case of camels; but we can hardly argue from Ungulata to Primates.

However this may be, the objections to Morgan's theories do not lose
their strength. Enough has perhaps been said of them from the point of
view of theory. We may look at them in the light of the known facts of
social evolution among races of low stages of culture.

If we now turn for a moment to see what light Australian facts throw on
the first two stages postulated by Mr Morgan, we find that the
theoretical objections are amply supported by the course of evolution
which can be traced in Australian social regulations. It will be
recollected that in his view father-daughter marriage disappeared first,
then brother and sister marriage. Totemism apart, there are in
Australia, as we have seen, two kinds of organisation for the regulation
of marriage--phratries, the dichotomous division of the southern tribes,
and classes, the four-fold or eight-fold division of the other areas as
to which we have any knowledge. Of these the phratry is demonstrably
older than the class. But the result of the division of a tribe into two
phratries is to prevent brother and sister marriage, while, so far as
phratry rules are concerned, father and daughter are still free to marry
in those tribes where the descent is matrilineal. The result (though not
necessarily the original object) of the class-system, on the other hand,
is to prevent the marriage of fathers and daughters and generally of the
older generation with the younger, so far as the classes actually
represent generations. In actual practice the class into which a man may
marry includes females of all ages, so that he is only debarred from
marrying young females if they are his own daughters. But if we may
assume that the original object of the classes was to prevent the
intermarriage of different generations, it is at once obvious that in
Australia the evolution postulated by Mr Morgan, if it took place at
all, took place in reverse order, the brother and sister marriage being
the first to be brought under the ban.

The objections to which attention has been called seem to make it
difficult if not impossible to accept Morgan's explanations either of
the processes or of the causes which led to the passage from promiscuity
to communal marriage.

FOOTNOTES:

[145] This is not really material.

[146] Properly speaking these are not stages in the same sense as the
other forms.

[147] See n