g the Australians and Red
Indians, by which all the clans of a certain area were divided into
two classes, and the men of any clan of one class could only marry or
have intercourse with the women of a clan of the other class. By such a
division the evil results of the mixture of totems in exogamous clans
with female descent would be avoided. The class system was sometimes
further strengthened by the rule, in Australia, that different classes
should, when they met, encamp on opposite sides of a creek or other
natural division [164]; whilst among the Red Indians, the classes camp
on opposite sides of the road, or live on different sides of the same
house or street. [165] In Australia, and very occasionally elsewhere,
the class system has been developed into four and eight sub-classes. A
man of one sub-class can only marry a woman of one other, and their
children belong to one of those different from either the father's or
mother's. This highly elaborate and artificial system was no doubt,
as stated by Sir J. G. Frazer, devised for the purpose of preventing
the intermarriage of parents and children belonging to different clans
where there are four sub-classes, and of first cousins where there are
eight sub-classes. [166] The class system, however, would not appear to
have been the earliest form of exogamy among the Australian tribes. Its
very complicated character, and the fact that the two principal classes
sometimes do not even have names, seem to preclude the idea of its
having been the first form of exogamy, which is a strong natural
feeling, so much so that it may almost be described as an instinct,
though of course not a primitive animal instinct. And just as the
totem clan, which establishes a sentiment of kinship between people
who are not related by blood, was prior to the individual family, so
exogamy, which forbids the marriage of people who are not related by
blood, must apparently have been prior to the feeling simply against
connections of persons related by blood or what we call incest. If the
two-class system was introduced in Australia to prohibit the marriage
of brothers and sisters at a time when they could not recognise each
other in adult life, then on the introduction of personal names which
would enable brothers and sisters to recognise and remember each other,
the two-class system should have been succeeded by a modern table of
prohibited degrees, and not by clan exogamy at all. It is suggested
that