[543] Journ. and Proc. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 339. Must we see a trace of sexual totemism in the following custom of the Warramunga? When a dead person is buried, a bone of the arm is kept. If it is a woman, the feathers of an emu are added to the bark in which it is wrapped up; if it is a man, the feathers of an owl (Nor. Tr., p. 169).
[544] Some cases are cited where each sexual group has two sexual totems; thus the Wurunjerri unite the sexual totems of the Kurnai (the emu-wren and the linnet) to those of the Wotjobaluk (the bat and the nightjar owl). See Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 150.
[545] Totemism, p. 51.
[546] Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 215.
[547] Threlkeld, quoted by Mathews, loc. cit., p. 339.
[548] Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 148, 151.
[549] Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 200-203; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 149; Petrie, op. cit., p. 62. Among the Kurnai, these bloody battles frequently terminate in marriages of which they are, as it were, a sort of ritual precursor. Sometimes they are merely plays (Petrie, loc. cit.).
[550] On this point, see our study on La Prohibition de l'inceste et ses origines, in the Année Sociologique, I, pp. 44 ff.
[551] However, as we shall presently see (ch. ix), there is a connection between the sexual totems and the great gods.
[552] Primitive Culture, I, p. 402; II, p. 237; Remarks on Totemism, with especial reference to some modern theories concerning it, in J.A.I., XXVIII, and I, New Series, p. 138.