It is probable that the rules now defining the privileges, prohibitions, and duties of sets of people, rules interwoven now with those of ‘class’ and totem, have been gradually evolved in the wear and tear of ages. Tribes which hold such large and protracted assemblies, or palavers, as the Arunta of to-day, discuss and debate common affairs with all the diffuseness of our Parliament at Westminster. It is not to be supposed that tribal peace existed over hundreds of square miles of country, and that the group representatives, so to speak, flocked in from far-off regions, to parliament, in the ages when the pristine rules of exogamy were evolved. We might as wisely imagine that, in the beginning of Totemism, groups travelled to a tribal folk-mote, and arranged the details of a kind of magical co-operative society to preserve and increase the foodstuffs of the tribe. In ages really pristine the tribal peace and union cannot have arisen; deliberate legislation for a vast scattered tribal community could not have entered into men’s dreams. No such community could have existed. But the tribes of to-day, and notably the Arunta, being remote from truly primitive conditions, do hold prolonged assemblies, and work at public problems, so very remote from the primitive are they. The Arunta, in their pseudo-historic legends, throw back upon the past the reflection of their actual estate, and ascribe the rule which practically limits marriage within the generation to a leader of the Thurathwerta group, living near what is called, by Europeans, Glen Helen, in the Macdonnell range. He was backed by the Emu people of four widely separated localities.[31] One is not, however, to suppose that, at some witan of the tribes, names indicative of generations, and of their respective rights, were suddenly invented and dealt out by ‘the legislator,’ any more than that totems were thus invented and dealt out. As Mr. Atkinson remarks (Chapter VIII.): ‘Gradually each generation ... would, _qua_ generation, come to be a distinctly defined class, with certain separate rights and obligations. In this simple classification of the connected persons, we see the origin of the classificatory system itself’ (as far as generations are concerned), ‘as an institution.... The classificatory system evolves itself merely as the result of a desire to define certain rights, and the division by generations was the most natural and feasible for the purpose.... Thus we find a desire for distinction, as regards rights in sexual union, to be the genetic cause of the classificatory system, both as concerns the generation and its component members.’