sion of the
evidence to be drawn from the tribes selected by Dr Howitt and Messrs
Spencer and Gillen, viz. the Dieri and the Urabunna.

It may however be pointed out that neither of these writers has dealt
with the passage from promiscuity to "group marriage," nor shown how
under the former system terms of relationship could come into existence
at all. With the difficulties we have dealt above.

We must now revert to the question of the origin of the so-called "terms
of relationship." Are they expressive of kinship or only of status and
duties? Neither Lewis Morgan nor the authorities on Australian marriage
customs--Dr Howitt and Messrs Spencer and Gillen--discuss the question
at length, but seem to regard it as an axiom (although they warn us that
all European ideas of relationship must be dismissed when we deal with
the classificatory system) that all these terms may be interpreted on
the hypothesis that the European relationships to which they most nearly
correspond actually existed in former times, not, as in Europe, between
individuals, but between groups. The case on which Spencer and Gillen
rely is that of the _unawa_ relationship. They argue that a man is
_unawa_ to a whole group of women, one of whom is his individual wife;
for this individual wife no special name exists, she is just _unawa_
(=_noa_) like all the other women he might have married. Consequently
the marital relation must have existed formerly between the man in
question and the whole group of _unawa_ women. The reasoning does not
seem absolutely conclusive, and our doubts as to the validity of the
argument are strengthened when we apply it to another case and find the
results inconsistent with facts which are known to the lowest savage.
Not only has a man only one name for the women he might have married,
and for the woman he actually did marry, but a mother has only one name
for the son she actually bore, and for the sons of the women who, if
they had become her husband's wives, would have borne him sons in her
stead. From this fact by parity of reasoning we must draw the obvious
conclusion that during the period when group marriage was the rule,
individual mothers were unknown. If we are entitled to conclude from the
fact that a man's wife bears the same name for him as all the other
women whom he might have married, that he at one time was the husband of
them all, then we are obviously equally entitled to conclude, from the
fact that a woman'