wever, nor Stokes[46],
who mentions them as existing among the Limba Karadjee, makes any
mention of their connection with marriage regulations. And Earl, at a
later period, omits in like manner to say what constituted membership of
a caste, though he states that they differed in rank. The
names--Manjarojally (fire people), Manjarwuli (land people), and
Mambulgit (makers of nets, perhaps, therefore, water people), as well as
the anomalous number of the classes, seem to indicate that they are of a
somewhat different nature to the real intermarrying classes found
elsewhere[47]. It is of course well known that the initiation ceremonies
and totemic system of the northern tribes on both sides of the Gulf of
Carpentaria differ somewhat widely from the normal Australian form.

None of the observers hitherto mentioned can be said however to have
applied himself to the scientific study of the questions raised by the
facts which they recorded. Anthropology was in those days in its
infancy. The first to make a really serious effort to clear up the many
difficult questions, some of them still matters of controversy, which a
closer study of the native marriage customs brought to the surface, was
a missionary anthropologist, a class of which England has produced all
too few. In 1853 the Rev. William Ridley published the first of many
studies of the Kamilaroi speaking tribes, and, thanks to the impetus
given to the investigation of systems of relationship and allied
questions by Lewis Morgan, was the pioneer of a series of efforts which
have rescued for us at the nick of time a record of the social
organisation of many tribes which under European influence are now
rapidly losing or have already lost all traces of their primitive
customs, if indeed they have not, like the tribes formerly resident at
Adelaide and other centres of population, been absolutely exterminated
by contact with the white man with his vices and his civilisation, or by
the less gentle method euphemistically termed "dispersion," which, if
other nations were the offenders, we should term massacre.

After Mr Ridley, Messrs Fison and Howitt turned their attention to the
Kamilaroi group of tribes. The progress of these investigations is
traced, historically and controversially, in the second series of
Maclennan's _Studies in Ancient History_, and it is unnecessary to deal
with it in detail. More and more light was thrown on totemism, marriage
regulations, and intermarr