g of the kins which is, with certain exceptions, of a more or
less local character, common to the whole of Australia, so far as our
information goes. Singularly enough this information, very full,
relatively, for the eastern and central tribes, has, so far as
South-West Australia is concerned, only just been completed, although
more than sixty years have elapsed since Grey wrote, the last twenty of
which have seen much additional light thrown on the organisation of the
tribes of the remainder of the continent.

The American tribes, where simple totemic exogamy is not the rule, are
organised in two and sometimes three or more, up to ten, phratries. It
is possible that Grey, in spite of his attention having been drawn to
the bi- or trichotomous organisation of American totem kins, failed to
understand the Australian system owing to the presence of an element,
discovered a few years later at a point remote from the scene of Grey's
researches, to which no American analogue exists. In addition to the
grouping of the kins into phratries, the Australian tribes over a large
part of the continent subdivide each phratry into two or four classes or
"castes," as they were frequently termed by the early investigators. The
effect of the class system is to further limit the choice of a given
individual, restricted to one-half of the women of the tribe under the
simple phratry system, to one-fourth of them or one-eighth, as the case
may be. Probably the first person to publish the fact of the existence
of these classes, which he regarded as differing in rank, was C.P.
Hodgson[43], who found them in 1846 among the blacks of Wide Bay. From a
letter of Leichardt's however it appears that the discovery must have
been made nearly simultaneously by several observers. Writing in
1847[44], he says that the castes are the most interesting and most
obscure feature among the tribes to the northward, and mentions F.N.
Isaacs as having noticed the existence of the classes among the natives
of Darling Downs, adding that Capt. Macarthur had also found them among
the Monobar tribes of the Coburg Peninsula. "These castes," he adds,
"are probably intimately connected with the laws of intermarriage."

If Leichardt's words mean, as apparently they do, that the Monobar
classes are regulative of marriage, and if his information was correct,
the first mention of classes in Australia is found, not in Hodgson's
work, but in Wilson's account[45]. Neither he, ho