When heaven, to punish the sins of the learned, permitted Messrs. Spencer and Gillen1 to discover and describe the institutions of the Arunta nation, it was found that these tribes practised an unheard-of kind of totemism. The totem was not hereditary, the totem-set of people in each case was not exogamous; a man who was a Dog might marry a woman who was a Dog, and their children might be Rat, Cat, and Frog.

Instantly some of the learned (A) averred that this unheard-of form of totemism was the oldest extant and the nearest to the primitive model; while others (B) declared that the Arunta totemism was a decadent ‘sport’, and showed how it arose, or might have arisen, out of exogamous totemism and hereditary totems. I was of the second party, the B division, from the first.

The A division, who regarded Arunta totemism as the earliest, naturally tried to show that, in other matters, the Arunta nation was the most primitive. The Arunta wore no clothes, and they were ignorant of the fact that sexual connexions are the cause of conception and birth – what could be more primitive? They also practised co-operative totemic magic; and co-operation, duly organized, may be more primitive than individual effort; the division of labour being also primitive.

To this the opposite faction (B) replied that the Arunta (1) exhibited confessedly the most complex, and, as had hitherto been agreed, the latest form of matrimonial rules, the ‘eight-class system’. Next (2), they reckon descent and transmit hereditable property in the male line, and hitherto we had unanimously supposed reckoning in the female line to be the earlier. Next (3), they had lost the names of their primary exogamous divisions (phratries), and, hitherto, these names had been looked on as very early. Next 4), they practised the bloody rites of initiation which Mr. Spencer thinks posterior in evolution to the south-eastern dentistry. (5) The Arunta have no ‘All Father’, and while the A disputants thought this a proof of primitiveness, the B party held that the animistic philosophy of the Arunta had left no logical raison d'etre for a creative ‘All Father’. (6) The B faction held that co-operation and division of labour, each totem-set doing magic for its own totem, were not primitive, but much the reverse.