48 RELATIONSHIPS. CHAPTER VI. RELATIONSHIPS. FOR many years I had been aware that the system of relationships amongst the Aborigines was different from ours, and had prepared a table of degrees of kinship: but I had not arranged them into a system. Some few months ago I received the following information in a circular, from the Rev. Lorimer Fison, of Victoria: Sydney, March 6th, 1871. SIR, About twenty years ago Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, of Rochester, New York, discovered among the Iroquois Indians an elaborate system of kinship widely differing from ours. Subsequent extensive inquiries carried on by this gentleman, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, U. S., disclosed the astonishing fact that this complicated system is in use not only among all the North American Indian tribes, but also among the Tamil and Telugu peoples of Southern India, who number some twenty-eight millions. Having made inquiries among the Fijians and the Friendly Islanders, at the instance of Professor Goldwin Smith, of the Cornell University, I found the system prevailing among all their tribes, and have moreover lately met with unmistakable traces thereof among the aborigines of Queensland. The chief peculiarities of the Tamilian system may be briefly stated as follows: 1. I being male, the children of my brothers are my sons and daughters, while the children of my sisters are my nephews and nieces; but the grandchildren of my sisters, as well as those of my brothers, are my grandchildren. 2. I being a female, the children of my sisters are my sons and daughters, while the children of my brothers are my nephews and nieces; but the grandchildren of my brothers, as well as those of my sisters, are my grandchildren. 3. All my father’s brothers are my fathers, but all my father’s sisters are my aunts. 4. All my mother’s sisters are my mothers, but all my mother’s brothers are my uncles. 5. The children of my father’s brothers are my brothers and sisters, so also are the children of my mother’s sisters; but the children of my father’s sisters and those of my mother’s brothers are my cousins. 6. I being male, the children of my male cousins are my nephews and nieces, but the children of my female cousins are my sons and daughters. [Note. These relationships are reversed in the North American Indian system, and this is the only important, point whereon that system differs from the Tamil.] 7. All the brothers of my grandfathers and those of my grandmothers are my grandfathers; all their sisters are my grandmothers.
