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, however, nor Stokes[46], who mentions them as existing among the Limba Karadjee, makes any mention of their connection with marriage regulations.  And Earl, at a later period, omits in like manner to say what constituted membership of a caste, though he states that they differed in rank.  The names—­Manjarojally (fire people), Manjarwuli (land people), and Mambulgit (makers of nets, perhaps, therefore, water people), as well as the anomalous number of the classes, seem to indicate that they are of a somewhat different nature to the real intermarrying classes found elsewhere[47].  It is of course well known that the initiation ceremonies and totemic system of the northern tribes on both sides of the Gulf of Carpentaria differ somewhat widely from the normal Australian form.