As Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say, we must ‘lay aside all preconceived ideas of relationship,’ when we study the Urabunna or other classificatory terms of relationships.[25] Let us do so, and the evidence borne by these terms to a past of communal marriage vanishes at once. That the terms often denote status in customary law is demonstrated. ‘There are certain customs which are enforced by long usage and according to which men and women of particular degrees of relationship may alone have marital relations, or may not speak to one another, or according to which one individual has to do certain things for another, such as providing the latter with food, or with hair, as the case may be, and any breach of these customs is severely punished. The elder men of each group very carefully keep alive these customs, many of which are of considerable value to themselves....’[26] Thus, you have speared a fish, or an opossum, but if you meet any man of your father-in-law’s set, you must drop your spoil and make off. Consequently, I venture to take it, the terms of relationship in no way answer to our ideas of kin, but merely denote legal status. HOW THE TERMS OF RELATIONSHIP ORIGINALLY AROSE We cannot, as a rule, recover (or Australian students have not recovered) the original sense and etymology of terms like Biaka, Nia, Nupa, and so forth. We are thus left to choose between two competing theories of their nature and diffusion. If we advocate the hypothesis of consanguine marriage and group marriage, we must suppose that the members of the ‘undivided commune’ of the theory, had once names absolutely identical in sense with our ‘father,’ ‘mother,’ ‘sister,’ ‘brother,’ ‘son,’ ‘daughter,’ and so forth. But the speakers, in each case, were obliged to apply these words with the utmost laxity, because who knew _who_ A’s father might be, and whether C’s sister were really his sister or not, while every girl was the wife of every male of her generation, not barred by other laws, and so on? The promiscuity of living, then, made this lax use of words for relationships inevitable. This is the usual hypothesis, and the sweeping scope of savage words for human relationships is accepted as proof that consanguine and group marriage once existed and left their marks in language. On the other hand, if communal marriage prevailed, the people who lived in that condition could not possibly have had ideas equivalent to our father, son, daughter, brother, wife, and so on. Our ideas of these relationships could not enter the human mind, at the hypothetical stage of culture when nobody knew ‘who is who’ and the hypothesis is wrecked on that fact.