foot of it, lies a young woman, about seventeen years of age, sobbing and partly supported by her mother, in the midst of wailing, weeping, women; she has been twice speared in the right breast with a jagged hand-spear by her brother, and is supposed to be dying.'

CHARMING A WOMAN BY MAGIC

Besides the three ways already mentioned of securing a wife -elopement, which is rare; capture, which is rarer still, and Tuelcha mura, in which a girl is assigned to a man before she is born, and while her prospective mother is still a girl herself— by far the commonest arrangement--there is a fourth, charming by magic. Of this, too, Spencer and Gillen have given the best description (541-44). When a man, they tell us, wants to charm a woman belonging to a distant tribe he takes a churinga, or sacred stick, and goes with some friends into the bush, where

"all night long the men keep up a low singing of Quabara songs, together with the chanting of amorous phrases of invitation addressed to the woman. At daylight the man stands up alone and swings the churinga, causing it first to strike the ground as he whirls it round and round and makes it hum. His friends remain silent, and the sound of the humming is carried to the ears of the far-distant woman, and has the power of compelling affection and of causing her sooner or later to comply with the summons. Not long ago, at Alice Springs, a man called some of his friends together and performed the ceremony, and in a very short time the desired woman, who was on this occasion a widow, came in from Glen Helen, about fifty miles to the west of Alice Springs, and the two are now man and wife."

The woman in this case need not be a widow, however. Another man's wife will do just as well, and if her owner comes armed to stop proceedings, the friends of the charmer stand by him.

Another method of obtaining a wife by magic is by means of a charmed chilara, or head-band of opossum fur. The man charms it in secret by singing over it. Then he places

it on his head and wears it about the camp so that the woman can see it. Her attention is drawn to it, and she becomes violently attached to the man, or, as the natives say, "her internal organs shake with eagerness." Here, again, it makes no difference whether the woman be married or not.

Still another way of charming a woman is by means of a certain shell ornament, which a man ties to his waist-belt at a corrobboree after having charmed it.1 "While he is dancing the woman whom he wishes to attract alone sees the lightning flashes on the Lonka-lonka, and all at once her internal organs shake with emotion. If possible she will creep into his camp that night or take the earliest opportunity to run. away with him.”

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Here, at last, we have come across a method which allows of the breaking through of the hard and fast rule which for the most part obtains, and according to which the woman belongs to the man to whom she has been betrothed, probably before her birth." Yet these cases are rare exceptions, for, as the authors inform us, "the woman naturally runs some risk, as, if caught in the act of eloping, she would be severely punished, if not put to death;" and again: these cases are not of frequent occurrence, for they depend on the woman's consent, and she knows that if caught she will in all probability be killed, or at least very roughly handled. Hence she is not very easily charmed away from her original posMoreover, even these adulterous elopements seldom lead to anything more than a temporary liaison, as we have seen, and it would be comic to speak of a "liberty of choice" in cases where such a choice can be exercised only at the risk of being killed on the spot.

sessor.

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The reader will note that here are some additional objects usually supposed to be " ornamental," but which, as in all the cases examined in the chapter on Personal Beauty, are seen on close examination to serve other than esthetic purposes. These are intended to charm the women, not, however, as things of beauty, but by their magic qualities and by attracting their attention.

OTHER OBSTACLES TO LOVE

Looking back over the ground traversed in this chapter, we see that Cupid is thwarted in Australia not only by the natural stupidity, coarseness, and sensuality of the natives, but by a number of artifical obstacles which seem to have been devised with almost diabolical ingenuity for the express purpose of stifling the germs of love. The selfish, systematic, and deliberate suppression of free choice is only one of these obstacles. There are two others almost equally fatal to love-the habit of marrying young girls to men old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers, and the complicated marriage taboos. We have already seen that as a rule the old men appropriate the young girls, the younger men not being allowed to marry till they are twenty-five or thirty, and even then being compelled to take an old man's cast-off wife of thirty-five or forty summers. "It is usual," says Curr (I., 110), to see old men with mere girls as wives, and men in the prime of life married to widows. Women have very frequently two husbands during their life-time, the first older and the second younger than themselves. There are

always many bachelors in every tribe." Not to speak of love, this arrangement makes it difficult even for animal passion to manifest itself except in an adulterous or illegiti

mate manner.

"At present," we learn from Spencer and Gillen (104, 558), "by far the most common method of getting a wife is by means of an arrangement made between brothers or fathers of the respective men and women whereby a particular woman is assigned to a particular man." This most usual method of getting a wife is also the most extraordinary. Suppose one man has a son, another a daughter, generally both of tender age. Now it would be bad enough to betroth these two without their consent and before they are

1 With his usual conscientions regard for facts Westermarck declares (70) that in a savage condition of life "every full-grown man marries as soon as possible."

old enough to have any real choice. But the Australian way is infinitely worse. It is arranged that the girl in the case shall be, by and by, not the boy's wife, but his mother-inlaw; that is, the boy is to wed her daughter. In other words, he must wait not only till she is old enough to marry but till her daughter is old enough to marry! And this is "by far the most common method"!

MARRIAGE TABOOS AND "INCEST."

The marriage taboos are no less artificial, absurd, and fatal to free choice and love. An Australian is not only forbidden to marry a girl who is closely related to him by blood-sometimes the prohibition extends to first, second, and even third cousins-but he must not think of such a thing as marrying a woman having his family name or belonging to certain tribes or clans-his own, his mother's or grandmother's, his neighbor's, or one speaking his dialect, etc. The result is more disastrous than one unfamiliar with Australian relationships would imagine; for these relationships are so complicated that to unravel them takes, in the words of Howitt (59), a patience compared with which that of Job is furious irritability."

These prohibitions are not to be trifled with. They extend even to war captives. If a couple disregard them and elope, they are followed by the indignant relatives in hot pursuit and, if taken, severely punished, perhaps even put to death. (Howitt, 300, 66.) Of the Kamilaroi the same writer says: "Should a man persist in keeping a woman who is denied to him by their laws, the penalty is that he should be driven out from the society of his friends and quite ignored. If that does not cure his fondness for the woman, his male relatives follow him and kill him, as a disgrace to their tribe, and the female relatives of the woman kill her for the same reason."

It is a mystery to anthropologists how these marriage taboos, these notions of real or fancied incest, could have ever arisen. Curr (I., 236) remarks pointedly that "most per

sons who have any practical knowledge of our savages will, I think, bear me out when I assert that, whatever their objections to consanguineous marriages may be, they have no more idea of the advantages of this or that sort of breeding, or of any laws of Nature bearing on the question, than they have of differential calculus. "1

Whatever may have been the origin of these prohibitions, it is obvious that, as I have said, they acted as obstacles to love; and what is more, in many cases they seem to have impeded legitimate marriage only, without interfering with licentious indulgence. Roth (67) cites O'Donnell to the effect that with the Kunandaburi tribe the jus primæ noctis is allowed all the men present at the camp without regard to class or kin. He also cites Beveridge, who had lived twentythree years in contact with the Riverina tribes and who assured him that, apart from marrying, there was no restriction on intercourse. In his book on South Australia J. D. Wood says (403) "The fact that marriage does not take place between members of the same tribe, or is forbidden amongst them, does not at all include the idea that chastity is observed within the same limits." Brough Smyth (II., 92) refers to the fact that secret violations of the rule against fornication within the forbidden classes were not punished. Bonwick (62) cites the Rev. C. Wilhelmi on the Port Lincoln customs: "There are no instances of two Karraris or two Matteris having been married together; and yet connections of a less virtuous character, which take place between members of the same caste, do not appear to be considered incestuous.” Similar testimony is adduced by Waitz-Gerland (VI., 776), and others.

We are occasionally warned not to underrate the intelligence of the aboriginal Australian. As a matter of fact, there is more danger of its being overrated, Thus it was long believed that what was known as the "terrible rite" (finditur usque ad urethram membrum virile - see Curr I., 52, 72- -was practised as a check to population; but surgeon-general Roth (179) has exploded this idea, and made it seem probable that this rite is merely a senseless counterpart of certain useless mutilations inflicted on females.