epresented a far higher stage of
development than the Australian classes.

It is, therefore, easy to understand how Morgan could regard this form
as the stage necessarily preceding the pairing family and attribute
general extension in former times to it. Since then we have learned of
several other forms of the group marriage, and we know that Morgan went
too far in this respect. But it was nevertheless his good fortune to
encounter in his Punaluan family the highest, the classical, form of
group marriage, that form which gave the simplest clue for the
transition to a higher stage.

The most essential contribution to our knowledge of the group marriage
we owe to the English missionary, Lorimer Fison, who studied this form
of the family for years on its classical ground, Australia. He found
the lowest stage of development among the Papuans near Mount Gambier in
South Australia. Here the whole tribe is divided into two great classes,
Kroki and Kumite.[16] Sexual intercourse within each of these classes is
strictly prohibited. But every man of one class is by birth the husband
of every woman of the other class, and vice versa. Not the individuals
are married to one another, but the whole groups, class to class. And
mark well, no caution is made anywhere on account of difference of age
or special consanguinity, unless it is resulting from the division into
two exogamous classes. A Kroki has for his wife every Kumite woman. And
as his own daughter, being the daughter of a Kumite woman, is also
Kumite according to maternal law, she is therefore the born wife of
every Kroki, including her father. At least, the class organization, as
we know it, does not exclude this possibility. Hence this organization
either arose at a time when, in spite of all dim endeavor to limit
inbreeding, sexual intercourse between parents and children was not yet
regarded with any particular horror; in this case the class system would
be directly evolved from a condition of unrestricted sexual relations.
Or the intercourse between parents and children was already proscribed
by custom, when the classes were formed; and in this case the present
condition points back to the consanguine family and is the first step
out of it. The latter case is the more probable. So far as I know, no
mention is made of any sexual intercourse between parents and children
in Australia. Even the later form of exogamy, the maternal law gens, as
a rule silently presupposes tha