tical constitution.
Yet in Australia there is at least one occasion when a sort of tribal
gathering takes place--namely, when their elaborate ceremonies for
the initiation of the youths is being held.

It would seem, however, that these ceremonies are, as often as not,
intertribal rather than tribal. So similar are the customs and beliefs
over wide areas, that groups with apparently little or nothing else
in common will assemble together, and take part in proceedings that
are something like a Pan-Anglican Congress and a World's Fair rolled
into one. To this indefinite type of intertribal association the term
"nation" is sometimes applied. Only when there is definite
organization, as never in Australia, and only occasionally in North
America, as amongst the Iroquois, can we venture to describe it as
a genuine "confederacy."

No doubt the reader's head is already in a whirl, though I have
perpetrated endless sins of omission and, I doubt not, of commission
as well, in order to simplify the glorious confusion of the subject
of the social organization prevailing in what is conveniently but
loosely lumped together as totemic society. Thus, I have omitted to
mention that sometimes the totems seem to have nothing to do at all
with the social organization; as, for example, amongst the famous
Arunta of central Australia, whom Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have so
carefully described. I have, again, refrained from pointing out that
sometimes there are exogamous divisions--some would call them moieties
to distinguish them from phratries--which have no clans grouped under
them, and, on the other hand, have themselves little or no resemblance
to totemic clans. These, and ever so many other exceptional cases,
I have simply passed by.

An even more serious kind of omission is the following. I have
throughout identified the social organization with the kinship
organization--namely, that into which a man is born in consequence
of the marriage laws and the system of reckoning descent. But there
are other secondary features of what can only be classed as social
organization, which have nothing to do with kinship. Sex, for instance,
has a direct bearing on social status. The men and the women often
form markedly distinct groups; so that we are almost reminded of the
way in which the male and the female linnets go about in separate flocks
as soon as the pairing season is over. Of course, disparity of
occupation has something to do with it.