No more perfect example of tribal organization exists than that of the tribes of Australasia. In a very large proportion of existing tribes, the tribe is an aggregate of several stocks or distinct bodies of kindred, the persons composing the tribes being included in stocks which are, or are accounted, distinct from each other. Two tribal customs, namely, the prohibition of marriage between persons of the same stock, and the reckoning of kinship through females only, so that children are accounted of the stock of their mother, sustain this organization. Persons of the same stock, too, owe duties to each other, and are to some extent participants in each other’s liabilities. An injury done by a man is an injury done by his stock, which may be avenged upon any member thereof; or an injury done to a man is an injury done by his stock, for which every member of it is bound to seek vengeance. As a consequence of these customs, a husband must be of a different stock from his wife or wives, and therefore must be accounted of a different stock from his children; and if he has wives of different stocks, then their respective children are accounted of different stocks. More than one stock, it will thus be perceived, is represented in every household. And since a man owes duties to his stock--the duties of acknowledged blood-relationship--while to those of his family who are not of his stock, there being nothing but the accident of birth to unite him, it necessarily follows that the family among these tribes has very little cohesion. Wholly sensuous is the language of the Australian, their abstraction tending only in the way of arithmetic as far as the number five, and that itself being quite an unusual stretch. Polysyllabic as it is in formation, and having the accent on the penultimate, it is not at all inharmonious. Though it comprehends many divergent forms, yet they seem to be all fundamentally connected, constituting a group entirely isolated from any of the linguistic families of the other parts of the world. Within its narrow confines the language is well developed and sensuously copious and expressive.