Speaking generally, however, the two primary exogamous classes exist, and to a Melanesian man, all women of his own generation count either as ‘sisters’ (barred) or as (potential) ‘wives.’ The appropriation of actual wives to their actual husbands ‘has by no means so strong a hold on native society,’ as the exogamous class divisions. By many students this license will be considered a survival of ‘group marriage.’ Prenuptial unchastity is wrong, but a breach of the exogamous rule used to be punished by death. Wife-lending used to be common, as in Central Australia, if the wife and guest were of opposite ‘divisions.’ Whether the license of certain feasts (as among Australians and Fijians) smiles on breaches of the exogamous law, does not seem quite certain.[5] In Banks Island and the North New Hebrides, there are but the two ‘primary class divisions.’ These have not names as in Australia--if once they had names, the names are lost. We find merely ‘divisions’ (veve), two ‘sides of the house.’ Every man knows his own division; all the women in it are tabu to him; all the women of the other division, in the same generation, are potential wives (with certain restrictions in practice). In Merlav, one of the Banks Islands, there are ‘families within the kin’ (answering to _gentes_--totem kins--in Australia). These families have _local_ names, as a rule: one has its name from the Octopus, but eats it freely. It is not inconceivable that here we have broken down and obliterated Totemism, among a settled agricultural people, probably dwelling, as a rule, in close contiguity.