The foregoing remarks on kinship, and the sketch of a general definition of kinship given above, of course bear upon the whole of the present investigations, since parental kinship being one of the relationships involved in the individual family, all that refers to this latter unit relates more or less immediately to parental kinship. In the other chapters we attempt to discuss the existence of the individual family, and of those of its features which appear to be universal, and which have, therefore, been adopted as the basis of parental kinship. The general features of the Australian individual family are given in the concluding chapter, and a comparison of the results presented there with the foregoing general definition of kinship[584] will be sufficient to satisfy the first point of this definition, _i. e._ to prove the existence of individual parental kinship in Australia and to describe its constant elements. In the following chapter (Chap. VII.) attention will be paid to the functions of kin, which correspond to the collective feelings of parents to children. Here we shall discuss the data taken from Australian folk-lore, which bear upon the parental kinship, and shall thus satisfy that part of our definition in which it was laid down that the ideas of kinship must be investigated. [584] pp. 198 _sqq._ The survey may commence with the Central tribes, the folk-lore of which we know best, owing to the excellent information given by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, subsequently confirmed in its main lines by the joint publication of Herr Strehlow and Frhr. von Leonhardi. In these works we possess a very detailed description of the aboriginal views on conception and birth, which are connected with their totemic beliefs. These views will not be reproduced here _in extenso_, and the reader is referred to the sources and the special works.[585] The reader is therefore, supposed to be acquainted with the aboriginal views on conception, and only the ideas which in these theories refer directly to our subject, _i. e._ those underlying parental kinship, will be dealt with here. [585] Here in the first place must be mentioned the works of Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, pp. 123-127, 255; _Nor. Tr._, pp. 144, 163 _sqq._, 169 _sqq._, 174-176, 150, 330, 331; Mrs. Parker, pp. 50 _sqq._, 61, 98.