The marriage rules prevalent, with many variations, among the people least advanced in material culture, the Australians, are thus seen, on the whole, to be based (1) on totem rules (in which, with Dr. Durkheim, we include the ‘primary classes’ or ‘phratries’), and (2) on the distinction of generations. It is clear, from the case of the Arunta and other tribes, that the rule of counting on the spindle side may break down, male descent being substituted, in times excessively rude; while again, as in the Pictish Royal House, it may elsewhere last into a stage relatively civilised. All manners of conditions and superstitions may affect and alter the course of social development in various places. GROUP MARRIAGE AND MR. TYLOR’s STATISTICS In 1899, Mr. Tylor published a sketch of ‘A Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions, applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent.’[32] He had catalogued the usages of 350 peoples, and examined (1) the rule of avoidance between husbands and wives’ relations, and vice versa. (2) The naming of husband (or wife) after their children; as Odysseus says, ‘May I no longer be called the father of Telemachus.’ (3) The nature of inheritance in widows. (4) The Couvade in which the husband pretends to lie in, while his wife is really doing so. (5) The custom of capture. (6) Exogamy and the classificatory system. Mr. Tylor was led to believe that, so far as the statistical evidence goes, the husband first lived with the wife’s family (A); next, after a residence with the wife’s family, went back to his own home (B); last, (C) took the wife at once to his own home. (Husband to Wife. Removal. Wife to Husband.) Now statistics are rather vague evidence without full knowledge of the social concomitants in each case. In what exact stage of culture, in each instance, does the husband go to live with the wife’s relations? We have not this information. But if this be really the earliest stage, how is it compatible with group marriage? If a man is husband to ‘a thousand miles of wives,’ how can he go and live with the relations of all his wives? Even within his actual region of wandering, how can he do this? Nor, perhaps, can he bring all his wives to live with the relations of each of them in turn? Either there was no group marriage, or it did not exist when, on the hypothesis, the husband, in the earliest stage, habitually resided with his wife’s relations. Again, take the maternal and paternal systems, the reckoning in the female or male line, the female line, as we hold with Mr. Tylor, being the earlier. If so, on Mr. Tylor’s hypothesis, it ought to arise in his first epoch, when husband goes to live with wife’s people. ‘The lines’ (of a diagram) ‘show the institutions of female descent, avuncular authority, &c. arising in the stage of residence on the female side, and extending into the stages of removal and residence on the male side.’