RELATIONSHIPS AND TOTEMS Some savants question the intellectual ability of the blacks because they have not elaborate systems of numeration and notation, which in their life were quite unneeded.

Such as were needed were supplied.

They are often incorporate in one word-noun and qualifying numerical adjective, as for example-- Gundooee A SOLITARY EMU Booloowah TWO EMUS Oogle oogle FOUR EMUS Gayyahnai FIVE OR SIX EMUS Gonurrun FOURTEEN OR FIFTEEN EMUS.
I fancy the brains that could have elaborated their marriage rules were capable of workaday arithmetic if necessary, and few indeed of us know our family trees as the blacks know theirs.
Even the smallest black child who can talk seems full of knowledge as to all his relations, animate and inanimate, the marriage taboos, and the rest of their complicated system.
The first division among this tribe is a blood distinction (I phratries'):-- Gwaigulleeah LIGHT BLOODED Gwaimudthen DARK BLOODED.
This distinction is not confined to the human beings of the tribe, who must be of one or the other, but there are the Gwaigulleeah and Gwaimudthen divisions in all things.

The first and chief division in our tribe, as regards customary marriage law, is the partition of all tribes-folk into these 'phratries,' or 'exogamous moieties.' While in most Australian tribes the meanings of the names of phratries are lost, where the meanings are known they are usually names of animals--Eagle, Hawk, and Crow, White Cockatoo and Black Cockatoo, and so forth.

Among the great Kamilaroi tribe, akin in speech to the Euahlayi, the names of phratries, DILBI and KUPATHIN, are of unknown significance.