Travels, 1791.

(2) Moeurs des Sauvages (1724), p. 461.

(3) Academy, December 15, 1883.

(4) Selected Essays (1881), ii. 376.

(5) Compare Mr. Max Muller's Contributions to the Science of Mythology.

The society of the Murri or black fellows of Australia is divided into
local tribes, each of which possesses, or used to possess, and hunt
over a considerable tract of country. These local tribes are united by
contiguity, and by common local interests, but not necessarily by blood
kinship. For example, the Port Mackay tribe, the Mount Gambier tribe,
the Ballarat tribe, all take their names from their district. In the
same way we might speak of the people of Strathclyde or of Northumbria
in early English history. Now, all these local tribes contain an
indefinite number of stocks of kindred, of men believing themselves to
be related by the ties of blood and common descent. That descent the
groups agree in tracing, not from some real or idealised human parent,
but from some animal, plant, or other natural object, as the kangaroo,
the emu, the iguana, the pelican, and so forth. Persons of the pelican
stock in the north of Queensland regard themselves as relations of
people of the same stock in the most southern parts of Australia. The
creature from which each tribe claims descent is called "of the same
flesh," while persons of another stock are "fresh flesh". A native may
not marry a woman of "his own flesh"; it is only a woman of "fresh" or
"strange" flesh he may marry. A man may not eat an animal of "his own
flesh"; he may only eat "strange flesh". Only under great stress of need
will an Australian eat the animal which is the flesh-and-blood cousin
and protector of his stock.(1) (These rules of marriage and blood,
however, do not apply among the Arunta of Central Australia, whose
Totems (if Totems they should be called) have been developed on very
different lines.(2)) Clearer evidence of the confusion between man and
beast, of the claiming of kin between man and beast, could hardly be.

(1) Dawson, Aborigines, pp. 26, 27; Howitt and Fison, Kamilaroi and
Kurnai, p. 169.

(2) Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia.

But the Australian philosophy of the intercommunion of Nature goes still
farther than this. Besides the local divisions and the kindred
stocks which trace their descent from animals, there exist among many
Australian tribes divisions of a kind still unexplained. For example,
every man