The existence of the undivided commune is a proof of promiscuity only for those who discover proofs of group marriage in the divided commune, in other words in the terms of relationship and the customs of the ordinary two-phratry tribe of the present day.  We may therefore let the decision of the question of the validity of terms of relationship as a proof of extensive connubial activities rest upon the discussion of the evidence to be drawn from the tribes selected by Dr Howitt and Messrs Spencer and Gillen, viz. the Dieri and the Urabunna.

It may however be pointed out that neither of these writers has dealt with the passage from promiscuity to “group marriage,” nor shown how under the former system terms of relationship could come into existence at all.  With the difficulties we have dealt above.

We must now revert to the question of the origin of the so-called “terms of relationship.”  Are they expressive of kinship or only of status and duties?  Neither Lewis Morgan nor the authorities on Australian marriage customs—­Dr Howitt and Messrs Spencer and Gillen—­discuss the question at length, but seem to regard it as an axiom (although they warn us that all European ideas of relationship must be dismissed when we deal with the classificatory system) that all these terms may be interpreted on the hypothesis that the European relationships to which they most nearly correspond actually existed in former times, not, as in Europe, between individuals, but between groups.  The case on which Spencer and Gillen rely is that of the unawa relationship.  They argue that a man is unawa to a whole group of women, one of whom is his individual wife; for this individual wife no special name exists, she is just unawa (=_noa_) like all the other women he might have married.  Consequently the marital relation must have existed formerly between the man in question and the whole group of unawa women.  The reasoning does not seem absolutely conclusive, and our doubts as to the validity of the argument are strengthened when we apply it to another case and find the results inconsistent with facts which are known to the lowest savage.  Not only has a man only one name for the women he might have married, and for the woman he actually did marry, but a mother has only one name for the son she actually bore, and for the sons of the women who, if they had become her husband’s wives, would have borne him sons in her stead.  From this fact by parity of reasoning we must draw the obvious conclusion that during the period when group marriage was the rule, individual mothers were unknown.  If we are entitled to conclude from the fact that a man’s wife bears the same name for him as all the other women whom he might have married, that he at one time was the husband of them all, then we are obviously equally entitled to conclude, from the fact that a woman’s son is known to her by the same name as the sons of other women, either that during the period of group marriage