s, which again is probably due to their lack
of intimate acquaintance with the tribe; and the Wolgal, Ngarrego and
Murring have the simple four-class rule that a man marries his mother's
brother's daughter.

We have seen in an earlier chapter that kinship and consanguinity are
distinct in their nature, though among civilised peoples they are not in
practice distinguishable. In the lower stages of culture it is otherwise,
as will be shown in detail below. Corresponding to this distinction of
consanguinity and kinship but not parallel to it we have two ways of
expressing these relationships--the descriptive and the classificatory.
The terminology of the former system is based on the principle of
reckoning the relationship of two people by the total number of steps
between them and the nearest lineal ancestor of both. The latter does not
concern itself with descent at all but expresses the status of the
individual as a member of a group of persons. Thus, to take a single
example, in a typical Australian tribe the word applied by a child to its
father is not used of him alone but of all the other males on the same
level of a generation provided they belong to the same phratry; to the
other half of the generation is applied the term usually translated
"mother's brother."

Unfortunately but few Australian lists of kinship terms have been drawn
up, and the anomalous tribes like the Kurnai have absorbed a large share
of attention. It is however possible to give tables for the three classes
of tribes with which we have been in the main concerned. Those given are
in use among the Wathi-Wathi of Victoria, the Ngerikudi-speaking people
of North Queensland and the Arunta[138].

_Wathi-Wathi Tribe: two-phratry._

-------------------------------------+------------------------------------+----
_Phratry A_ | _Phratry B_ |Gen-
|_Naponui_ | |_Kokonui_ |er-
|(mother's father) | |(mother's mother)|at-
|_Miimui_ | |_Matui_ |ion
|(father's mother) | |(father's father)|
| | | | I
------------------+------------------+------------------+-----------------+
_Mamui_ | |_Kukui_ | |
(father) |