Now to what do the traditions amount, as regards earlier marriage laws and customs at variance with those now in use among the Arunta? They amount to this: (1) Men of one totem had marital relations normally with women of the same totem. It is no longer the case that Arunta men have relations, normally and exclusively, with women of the same totem; a man may marry a woman of his own totem, or not, as he pleases. But so, in the traditions of the primeval trek, a man might, and did, take women of other totems as he pleased, by conquest probably; though these women seem to have lived, hitherto, solely with men of their own totem. The tradition starts from the hypothesis that all members of each mythical wandering totem group were originally of the same totem. That being so, the men naturally lived, when on trek, with women of their totem, taking women of other totems as they came across them. No longer on trek, the Arunta of to-day do the same thing, many women of their own or any other totem. The only shade of difference arises from the nature of the mythical theory, that many totem groups were originally migratory. But the present Arunta system of ‘go as you please’ in marriage (as far as totems are concerned) differs from the regular custom of the neighbouring Urabunna, for example. That difference, the Arunta probably feel, needs explanation. So their myth explains it, ‘we Arunta always acted thus from the beginning.’ So far the ‘tradition’ of Messrs Spencer and Gillen seems to me to be an ordinary explanatory myth. (2) At the supposed time (a time when many human types were still in the husk!) men and women of what are now ‘exogamic groups’ (‘phratries’ or ‘classes’) had marital relations contrary to present usage.