pple for himself with the mass of highly
interesting but bewildering details concerning social organization
to be found in any of the leading first-hand authorities. For instance,
for Australia he can do no better than consult the two fascinating
works of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen on the Central tribes, or the no
less illuminating volume of Howitt on the natives of the South-eastern
region; whilst for North America there are many excellent monographs
to choose from amongst those issued by the Bureau of Ethnology of the
Smithsonian Institution. Or, if he is content to allow some one else
to collect the material for him, his best plan will be to consult Dr.
Frazer's monumental treatise, _Totemism and Exogamy_, which
epitomizes the known facts for the whole wide world, as surveyed region
by region.

The first thing to grasp is that, for peoples of this type, social
organization is, primarily and on the face of it, identical with
kinship-organization. Before proceeding further, let us see what
kinship means. Distinguish kinship from consanguinity. Consanguinity
is a physical fact. It depends on birth, and covers all one's real
blood-relationships, whether recognized by society or not. Kinship,
on the other hand, is a sociological fact. It depends on the
conventional system of counting descent. Thus it may exclude real
relationships; whilst, contrariwise, it may include such as are purely
fictitious, as when some one is allowed by law to adopt a child as
if it were his own. Now, under civilized conditions, though there is,
as we have just seen, such an institution as adoption, whilst, again,
there is the case of the illegitimate child, who can claim
consanguinity, but can never, in English law at least, attain to
kinship, yet, on the whole, we are hardly conscious of the difference
between the genuine blood-tie and the social institution that is
modelled more or less closely upon it. In primitive society, however,
consanguinity tends to be wider than kinship by as much again. In other
words, in the recognition of kinship one entire side of the family
is usually left clean out of account. A man's kin comprises either
his mother's people or his father's people, but not both. Remember
that by the law of exogamy, the father and mother are strangers to
each other. Hence, primitive society, as it were, issues a judgment
of Solomon to the effect that, since they are not prepared to halve
their child, it must belong body and soul