Against this idea we have the opinion of Mr. Frazer, and of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.[37] The Arunta traditions, they say, and Mr. Frazer agrees with them, do not explain the present system, but deal with a former state of organisation and with customs quite different from the present. They do, but the Arunta invented the customs described in their myths, on purpose to explain, mythically, how the present customs arose out of deliberate modification of the alleged older customs. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen themselves assert this: ‘the traditions point to a very definite introduction of an exogamic system, long after the totemic groups were fully developed, and, further, they point very clearly to the fact that the introduction was due to the deliberate action of certain ancestors,’ which is the theory of Mr. Lewis Morgan! The rest is true, but I, like Dr. Durkheim, conceive that all is (except where we have external evidence for deliberate modification of the ‘classes’) merely part of the Arunta ætiological or explanatory myth. That myth starts from the belief (Mr. Howitt’s belief?) in primary totemic, but not exogamous groups, such as are precisely the present groups of the Arunta, though not of their neighbours the Urabunna, or of totemists in general. This exceptional condition of Arunta affairs needed explanation, and got it, in the myth that the groups were originally totemic, but not exogamous, as Arunta totem groups still are. Exogamy (not applying to totem groups, but to ‘phratries’) was brought in, the myth says, by deliberate action, by our old friend, ‘the Legislator,’ The Arunta traditions, therefore, do explain ‘the origin of the present system,’ of the Arunta, as far as exogamy goes; and their explanation is as much a speculative hypothesis as Mr. Morgan’s equivalent theory. It is one more example of the coincidence of savage myth and scientific hypothesis. MR. SPENCER ON ARUNTA LEGENDS I understand Messrs. Spencer and Gillen to contest this opinion, in one passage, and to assert it, under qualifications, in another. Their exact words must be given. ‘If they’ (Arunta traditions) ‘simply explained the origin of the present system out of, as it were, no system, then we might regard them as simply myths invented to account for the former’ (i.e. ‘the present system’), ‘but when we find that they deal with a gradual development, and with a former state of organisation and customs quite different from, and in important respects at variance with, the organisation and customs of the present day, we are probably right in regarding them as actually indicative of a time when these were different from those now in force.’[38]