exogamy across the river, it seems easy to understand how the numbers on both sides might increase until, whilst remaining Cockatoos and Crows for cross-river purposes, they would find it necessary to adopt among themselves subordinate distinctions; such as would be sure to model themselves on the old Cockatoo-Crow principle of separate totemic badges.  But we must not wander off into questions of origin.  It is enough for our present purpose to have noted the fact that, within the tribe, there are normally other forms of social grouping into which a man is born, as well as the clan.

[Footnote 5:  From a Greek word meaning “brotherhood,” which was applied to a very similar institution.]

Now we come to the tribe.  This may be described as the political unit.  Its constitution tends to be lax and its functions vague.  One way of seizing its nature is to think of it as the social union within which exogamy takes place.  The intermarrying groups naturally hang together, and are thus in their entirety endogamous, in the sense that marriage with pure outsiders is disallowed by custom.  Moreover, by mingling in this way, they are likely to attain to the use of a common dialect, and a common name, speaking of themselves, for instance, as “the men,” and lumping the rest of humanity together as “foreigners.”  To act together, however, as, for instance, in war, in order to repel incursions on the part of the said foreigners, is not easy without some definite organization.  In Australia, where there is very little war, this organization is mostly wanting.  In North America, on the other hand, amongst the more advanced and warlike tribes, we find regular tribal officers, and some approach to a political 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