We reach relatively firm ground, on the other hand, when we pass on to consider the social organization of such exogamous and totemic peoples as the natives of Australia. The only trouble here is that the subject is too vast and complicated to permit of a handling at once summary and simple. Perhaps the most useful thing that can be done for the reader in a short space is to provide him with a few elementary distinctions, applying not only to the Australians, but more or less to totemic societies in general. With the help of these he may proceed to grapple for himself with the mass of highly interesting but bewildering details concerning social organization to be found in any of the leading first-hand authorities. For instance, for Australia he can do no better than consult the two fascinating works of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen on the Central tribes, or the no less illuminating volume of Howitt on the natives of the South-eastern region; whilst for North America there are many excellent monographs to choose from amongst those issued by the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. Or, if he is content to allow some one else to collect the material for him, his best plan will be to consult Dr. Frazer's monumental treatise, _Totemism and Exogamy_, which epitomizes the known facts for the whole wide world, as surveyed region by region. The first thing to grasp is that, for peoples of this type, social organization is, primarily and on the face of it, identical with kinship-organization. Before proceeding further, let us see what kinship means. Distinguish kinship from consanguinity. Consanguinity is a physical fact. It depends on birth, and covers all one's real blood-relationships, whether recognized by society or not. Kinship, on the other hand, is a sociological fact. It depends on the conventional system of counting descent. Thus it may exclude real relationships; whilst, contrariwise, it may include such as are purely fictitious, as when some one is allowed by law to adopt a child as if it were his own. Now, under civilized conditions, though there is, as we have just seen, such an institution as adoption, whilst, again, there is the case of the illegitimate child, who can claim consanguinity, but can never, in English law at least, attain to kinship, yet, on the whole, we are hardly conscious of the difference between the genuine blood-tie and the social institution that is modelled more or less closely upon it. In primitive society, however, consanguinity tends to be wider than kinship by as much again. In other words, in the recognition of kinship one entire side of the family is usually left clean out of account. A man's kin comprises either his mother's people or his father's people, but not both. Remember that by the law of exogamy, the father and mother are strangers to each other. Hence, primitive society, as it were, issues a judgment of Solomon to the effect that, since they are not prepared to halve