phratry.  Among the similarly organised Yandairunga the limitation is to certain totems, and Dr Howitt gives other examples of the same order.  In the Kongulu tribe these totemic classes seem to have been known by special names.  In the Wotjoballuk tribe there are sub-totems, grouped with certain totems, which again seem to be collected into aggregates intermediate between the phratry and the simple totem kin.  But it is difficult to see why, if the classes have arisen out of such organisations, there should be found over the great part of Australia four, and only four, classes from which the eight have obviously developed.  In any case we have no parallel in these modifications to the alternate generations of the class system.

These find an analogue, according to an old report, not subsequently confirmed, in the Wailwun tribe, where, however, it is supplementary to the classes.  We are told that there are four totems in this tribe, though this does not agree with other reports, and that they are found in both phratries indiscriminately.  A woman’s children do not take her totem, nor, apparently, the totem of her brother, who belongs to a different kin, but are of the remaining two totems according to their sex[131].  From this it follows that the totems alternate, precisely as do the classes; the difference in the arrangement consists in the distinction of totem falling to males and females, which has no analogue in the class system.  But such arrangements, even if we may take them as established facts, are clearly of secondary origin, and can hardly give a clue to the origin of the classes.

There is an important difference between the four-class and eight-class organisations in respect of the totem kins.  In the former systems the kins are almost invariably divided between the phratries; but within them they do not belong to either of the classes, though certain classes claim them[132]; but on the contrary, of necessity are divided between them.  In the eight-class tribes this seems to be the case in some tribes also; in others, like the Arunta, abnormalities of development cause the totems to fall in both phratries.  But in the Mara, the Mayoo, and the Warramunga[133] they fall, or are stated to fall, in the first case into groups according to the four classes, in the other cases according to the “couples,” i.e. the two classes which stand in the relation of parent and child (the son of Panunga is Appungerta, his son is again Panunga, and so for the other pairs).  This suggests that totemism has something to do with the division of the four classes into eight, as was pointed out by Dr Durkheim in 1905[134].  His argument is that as long as descent was in the female line, the rule was that a man could not marry a woman of his mother’s totem.  When the change to male descent took place, the mother’s totem, as we see by actual examples[135], did not lose the respect which it formerly enjoyed; there is in more than one