oms apart. He may at will lend
her or hire her out to strangers; he may punish her infidelity,
disobedience or awkwardness by chastisement, not stopping short of the
infliction of spear or club wounds; he may even, according to Roth[16],
go so far as to kill her and yet get off scot free, his only duty in
such a case being to provide a sister for the brothers of his dead wife
to kill in retaliation.

This custom suggests that the kin to which the woman belongs claim a
certain property in her even after she is married, and this partial
proprietorship naturally implies a slight protecting influence; for it
would clearly not be in every case easy for the homicidal male to find a
sister ready to go out and be killed as a set-off to his murdered wife.
We should not, it is true, overlook the fact that the customs of the
Pitta-Pitta differ from those of many of the Australian tribes, in that
exchange of sisters is not practised. Otherwise it would be tempting to
argue that this proprietorship in the women of their kin may go back to
the time of Mr Lang's connubial groups and help to explain the reckoning
of descent through females. For clearly, if a woman still belongs in a
sense to the group she has left, so may her children belong to the same
group, inasmuch as their relationship to her is, to us at any rate,
unmistakeable. If any evidence could be produced for the widespread
existence of the custom (found in various parts of the globe, though
not, up to the present, in Australia), according to which the widow and
her children remove to her own district, some probability would be
imparted to this hypothesis.

The ordinary rule as regards punishment inflicted by the husband on the
wife seems to be that he may go any length short of doing her a mortal
injury, without being liable to be called to account. The punishment of
death however may only be inflicted for adultery and certain specified
offences without incurring a blood-feud with the woman's relatives.

It is by no means improbable that under the influence of the custom of
exchanging sisters there may be a tendency for the control of the kin in
this respect to diminish; in fact the Boulia example is only explicable
on this hypothesis. At the same time we cannot overlook the fact that
elopement, or real marriage by capture, as distinguished from formal
abduction, would, so far as we can see, have a similar effect, and the
rise of the custom of exchange of sisters would