If we examine the different items of the folk-lore, traditions, beliefs and customs of the Arunta, we can at first sight hardly discover any ideas that bear upon our subject. Fortunately, in the case of some of the Northern tribes, we are in possession of information which appears highly suggestive in regard to our problem. The Gnanji and Umbaia tribes of the Northern territory share the belief in totemic conception with all the more Southern tribes. But amongst them the child is always of the same totem as its father, wherever conception may have taken place. These tribes have a theory to reconcile these two beliefs that apparently are incompatible, viz. descent of totem in paternal line and birth by incarnation of a spirit-child.[618] They believe that spirits of the husband's totem follow the wife wherever the married couple may go, and that one of these spirit individuals enters the woman's body whenever it pleases; no spirit-child of any other totem could enter her. The infant is therefore always of the husband's totem, and it is the _reincarnation of this individual spirit_ which has chosen to follow the man and his wife on their wanderings. In this belief there are, undoubtedly, contained ideas of a strong tie of sympathy, affinity or kinship between the father and his future child. In the first place the spirit-child, which undergoes reincarnation, belongs to the totem of the husband; but that does not as yet create any individual relation between the father and the child, although it constitutes a bond of totemic kinship between them. [618] _See_ Spencer and Gillen, _Nor. Tr._, pp. 169 _sqq._