bilities can be demonstrated. I may take as an example the argument of Mr. N. W. Thomas, which I have already mentioned, in which the classing of the maternal grandfather with the elder brother by the Dieri is regarded as reducing to an absurdity the contention that classificatory terms express ties of kinship. If Mr. Thomas had had a more lively faith in the social meaning of terms of relationship, he might have been led to notice that the Dieri marry the granddaughter of a brother, a fact he appears, in common with many other readers of Howitt, to have missed; one result of this marriage is to bring about just such a relationship as Howitt records without a man being his own great-uncle, as is supposed to be necessary by Mr. Thomas.
Still another example may be taken from Professor Kroeber. He states that the classing together of the grandfather and the father-in-law which is found in the Dakota system, when worked out to its implications, would lead to the absurd conclusion that marriage with the mother was once customary among the Sioux. Here again, if Professor Kroeber had been less imbued with his belief in a purely linguistic and psychological chain of causation, and had been ready to entertain the idea that there might be a social meaning, he must have been led to see that the features of nomenclature in question would follow from other forms of marriage, and two of these, whatever their apparent improbability in America, cannot well be
