that his argument overlooked the northern and central facts in tribes with all the social advances, but with no All Father belief. Here a strange confusion arose. Mr. Howitt (Folk-Lore, p. 175) cites me as quoting Messrs. Spencer and Gillen for the central and northern facts, while on the same page, and on page 188, he says that I represented the facts of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen as parts of his "own collection of facts,"
Surely Mr. Howitt might have seen that I could not intend to ascribe to him the authority for facts which he says that I quoted as given by two other authors? The truth is that a comma, accidentally standing where it ought not (Folk-Lore, Vol. xvi. No. 2, p. 223), caused the impression in Mr. Howitt's mind that I attributed to him the facts for which I also referred to Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.
The sentence runs—erroneously punctuated—"We are here on the ground of facts carefully recorded, though strangely overlooked, by Mr. Howitt . . ."
Delete the second comma![1]
However, probably I should not have said that Mr. Howitt "strangely overlooked" the northern facts. I should have said that, if he really was arguing, as I supposed, for the All Father belief as a concomitant or result of certain social advances, he might explain why, in a very large area, we have all the social advances without the belief. For the sake of brevity, I shall not discuss Mr. Howitt's theory of what he calls "group marriage," and I call pirrauru, till he completes the general criticism which he promises, and for which I thank him in advance. As he sometimes misconceives my meaning in his recent paper, and fails to understand my reasoning, I venture to wish myself better fortune in his promised critique; and I
- ↑ [We apologise for the misleading comma. Mr. Lang is so exact in such matters that we are in the habit of leaving his punctuation entirely unaltered; hence the unusual error, whosever it were, escaped correction in proof.—Ed.
