logy to be employed, and give a brief survey of a
typical organisation. Looking at the population from the territorial
point of view in the first place, we find aggregates of tribes; these
may be termed _nations_. The component tribes are friendly, one with
another; they may and often do hold initiation ceremonies and other
ceremonials in common; although the language is usually syntactically
the same, and though they contain many words in common, the vocabularies
differ to such an extent that members of different tribes are not
mutually intelligible. How far the occurrence of identical kinship
organisation and nomenclature should be taken as indicating a still
larger unity than the nation is a difficult question. _Prima facie_ the
nation is a relatively late phenomenon; but the distribution of the
names of kinship organisations, as will be shown later, indicates that
communication, if not alliance, existed over a wide area at some
periods, which it is difficult to suppose were anything but remote.

The idea of the _tribe_ has already been defined. It is a community
which occupies a definite area, recognises its solidarity and possesses
a common speech or dialects of the same.

Between the tribe and the family occur various subdivisions, known as
sub-tribes, hordes, local groups, etc., but without any very clear
definition of their nature. It appears, however, that the tribal area is
sometimes so parcelled out that property in it is vested, not in the
tribe as a whole, but in the _local group_, which welcomes
fellow-tribesmen in times of plenty, but has the right of punishing
intruders of the same tribe who seek for food without permission; for a
non-tribesman the penalty is death. In some cases the local group is
little more than an undivided family including three generations; it may
then occupy and own an area of some ten miles radius. In other cases the
term is applied to a larger aggregate, the nature and rights of which
are not strictly defined; it may number some hundreds of persons and
form one-third of the whole tribe; it seems best to denominate such an
aggregate by the name of _sub-tribe_.

The term _family_ may be retained in its ordinary sense.

Superposed on the tribal organisation are the kinship organisations,
which, in the case of most Australian tribes, are independent of
locality. Leaving out of account certain anomalous tribes, it may be
said broadly that an Australian tribe is divided into two se