Gayyahnai FIVE OR SIX EMUS

Gonurrun FOURTEEN OR FIFTEEN EMUS.

I fancy the brains that could have elaborated their marriage rules were
capable of workaday arithmetic if necessary, and few indeed of us know
our family trees as the blacks know theirs.

Even the smallest black child who can talk seems full of knowledge as
to all his relations, animate and inanimate, the marriage taboos, and
the rest of their complicated system.

The first division among this tribe is a blood distinction (I
phratries'):--

Gwaigulleeah LIGHT BLOODED

Gwaimudthen DARK BLOODED.

This distinction is not confined to the human beings of the tribe, who
must be of one or the other, but there are the Gwaigulleeah and
Gwaimudthen divisions in all things. The first and chief division in
our tribe, as regards customary marriage law, is the partition of all
tribes-folk into these 'phratries,' or 'exogamous moieties.' While in
most Australian tribes the meanings of the names of phratries are lost,
where the meanings are known they are usually names of animals--Eagle,
Hawk, and Crow, White Cockatoo and Black Cockatoo, and so forth. Among
the great Kamilaroi tribe, akin in speech to the Euahlayi, the names of
phratries, DILBI and KUPATHIN, are of unknown significance. The