t to penetrate beneath the range of development, to search for
the social group at the farthest from the centre point from which
migration started, to discover, if we can, relics of group hostility,
hostile capture of women and of kinless society, all of which belong
to the primary stage from which totemic development has taken place.
If we can do this, we may hope to arrive at the origin of totemism,
and we are more likely to accomplish it in the case of the Australians
than with any other people. If we cannot, as Mr. Lang alleges,
anywhere see "absolutely primitive man and a totemic system in the
making,"[366] we may go back along the lines from which totemism has
developed in Australian society and see somewhat of the process of the
making.

We may commence with evidence of the survival of the most primitive
human trait, the condition of hostility among the local groups
produced by the struggle for women. "The possession of a girl appears
to be connected with all their ideas of fighting ... after a battle
the girls do not always follow their fugitive husbands from the field,
but frequently go over as a matter of course to the victors, even with
young children on their backs."[367] Mr. Curr puts the evidence even
more definitely in a primitive setting when he informs us of "the
young bachelors of the tribe carrying off some of the girl wives of
the grey-beards," leaving the old territory and settling at the first
convenient place within thirty or forty miles of the old territory. I
call this state of things "survival,"[368] because it is the existence
in totemic society of the fundamental basis of pre-totemic society. It
is checked in Australian totemic society by rules which show a strong
development from the primitive. Thus the successful warrior may not
take any of his captives to himself; "if a warrior took to himself a
captive who belonged to a forbidden class, he would be hunted down
like a wild beast," is the evidence of Mr. Fison, who allows it to be
"a strong statement, but it rests upon strong evidence."[369] This is
the exogamous class system operating even in the case of conflict,
when men have resorted to their primitive instincts and their
primitive methods.

This discovery of primitive hostility accompanying the obtaining of
wives leads us to look for other survivals of the earliest conditions,
and we come upon mother-right groups in which the females in each
local group are the sexual companions of m