so intimate as to carry a belief in actual kinship, and to prevent marriage between men and women bearing the same totem name. A Kangaroo man, pointing to a photograph of himself, said, 'That one is just the same as me; so is a Kangaroo.' So vital is the belief, that the man will generally abstain from eating the ancestral animal or plant. In some parts of New Caledonia the killing and eating of the totem is believed to be punished by disease or death; and in Australia, as also in Malaya, the death of the totem animal sometimes involves that of a native of the kin which bears the animal's name. When, under stress of hunger, abstinence is violated, it is frequently accompanied by a propitiatory act, into which is imported a ceremonial significance allied to the ritual of killing and eating the animal as a sacramental meal, a ritual which has abundant illustration in 'The Golden Bough.' Dr. Frazer tells us that, since no evidence is producible that totemism was a factor in the social institutions of Europe, North Africa, and Asia, India excepted, or that it has ever been practised by any of the great families of mankind which have played the most conspicuous part in history-the Aryan, the Semitic and the Turanian'; and since discussion of the 'vexed question of totemism in classic and Oriental antiquity has yielded barren results,' he limits the enquiry to the dark-skinned and least-civilised races. A demurrer to this will be raised by the champion of pan-totemism, M. Salomon Reinach. In his weighty judgment, Totemism seems to have been as widespread as the animism from which it was derived; the religions of Egypt, Syria, Greece, Italy and Gaul are all impregnated with it.' Dr Jevons holds that 'probably every species of animals has been worshipped as a totem somewhere or other, at some time or other.' But the late Prof. W. Robertson Smith, Dr Frazer, and Mr Andrew Lang agree in according to totemism only a subordinate place in the evolution of religion. As Mr Lang puts it, 'Totems, in their earliest known stage, have very little to do with religion, and probably, in origin, had nothing really religious about them.'‡ But, if it be admitted * Orpheus,' p. 15. + Introduction to the History of Religion,' p. 117. that religion is a branch of sociology, it is more or less intertwined with totemism; and that that institution has both a religious and a social side can scarcely be denied. On its religious side it has given birth, or, if this be not conceded, at least, an impetus, to that worship of animals which had its source in the belief that they possess mysterious power through some spirit within them; and on its social side it has led to prohibitions which are interwoven among the customs and prejudices of even civilised communities. Throughout the habitable globe there is evidence of man's emergence from lower to higher conditions. The primitive tools and weapons which every explored area has yielded are not the most important witnesses. There is the great body of survivals of rites and customs of which the intermediate forms, like the missing links in the biological chain, are obscure, but which, under analysis and comparison, reveal ideas akin to those whence totemism sprang. Although Dr Frazer has warrant for the limitations which he draws in excluding what he regards as speculative, wherein lies not unneeded counsel to those prone to spin theories out of 'little wool,' the exclusion too readily assumes that the distribution of totemism has been sporadic. There is evidence of its existence in historic times in places which appear blank on the map; and an example of this is quoted by Dr Frazer from Garcilasso de la Vega, whose work on the Incas dates from the early years of the seventeenth century. Garcilasso says that The Collas of Peru thought that their first progenitor had come out of a river,' and that they held it in great reverence and veneration as a father, looking upon the killing of fish in that river as sacrilege, for they said that the fish were their brothers.' Dr Frazer has, however, full warrant for fixing attention on material chiefly collected in the geologically and ethnically long-isolated Australian continent land of living fossils,' as Darwin happily called it because it is there that totemism still prevails in what appear to be its most primitive forms. In connexion with that term, too often vaguely used, Sir Herbert Risley's caution should be borne in mind. · "The doubt occurs to one whether small and moribund tribes such as the Australians can fairly be taken to be typical of primitive man. If they could, then man would be primitive still, and we should none of us have got to the point of vexing our souls about the origin of anything. It seems then that the quest of primitive man ready made and only waiting to be observed and analysed may be nothing better than a tempting short cut leading to delusion, and that what we must look to is not so much primitive man as primitive usage regarded in its bearing on evolution.' The central portion of Australia is inhabited by tribes who, if we except the extinct Tasmanians, and, perhaps, the Andaman Islanders, most nearly represent what may be inferred about the earliest paleolithic races. They are in the nomadic stage, wandering within roughlydefined areas, their isolation being also fostered by the variety of their tribal dialects. The physical character of large portions of central Australia as a land of scrub and sand largely accounts for the low level at which the aborigines remain. The men hunt with spear and boomerang, and the women prod the soil for roots, grubs and worms. Cannibalism prevails in some parts; 'in South Queensland it was the recognised method of giving honourable burial to your friends.'† Dress is chiefly limited to a loin-cloth; and vanity alone prompts the wearing of the cast-off hat or boots of the white man. The only dwellings are of the rudest character, such as wind-shelters made of branches; and, until the arrival of settlers, there was no knowledge of metals. The natives have no pottery and cannot count beyond their fingers, but they show a rude artistic skill in the figures scratched and painted in colours on rocks, and in the patterns which adorn their shields. But the art is of a lower type than the well-known examples in caverns of the Reindeer period in Western Europe, and in the rockpaintings of the Bushmen. The fear of ghosts does not appear to have developed into the worship of ancestral spirits; but the conflicting opinions as to the religion of the Australian black fellows' only prove how little is known about it. The remarkable feature of communities on so low a plane is in their social arrangements, notably in the rules * 'People of India,' p. 104. ↑ Thomas, 'Natives of N. W. Australia,' p. 109. regulating marriage, which are so complicated that, compared with them, the Table of Kindred and Affinity in our Prayer-book is simplicity itself. Of these, as of their general body of law, M. Reinach laconically says, 'they are algebra, not literature.' Each tribe is divided into two exogamous phratries with different totemnames, as, to take a widely-diffused example, that of Eaglehawks and Crows. Among some of the tribes the phratries are subdivided into four or more classes, whereby the choice of mates is further restricted. But the phratry is the main line of cleavage, because it indicates prohibition of marriage between individuals of the same totem; and, as the title of Dr Frazer's work implies, the institution of exogamy occupies a considerable portion of his space. Here, however, it can have only brief consideration, because space-limits forbid, and because the chief interest centres round the origin of totemism. Dr Frazer, who in this opinion enjoys the support of our doyen among anthropologists, Dr Tylor, does not regard the two institutions as necessarily interdependent; Mr Crawley and Mr Andrew Lang are at one in thinking it probable that exogamous tendencies, arising chiefly from sexual causes, may be older than totemism; while Sir Herbert Risley and Dr Emile Durkheim regard the two as inextricably blended. The Rev. John Mathew, a high authority on Australian social life, sees in the phratries of each tribe descendants of two races whose antagonism may supply the key to the exogamic puzzle; and it is generally agreed that the Australian aborigines are a mixed people (the difficulty would be to find an unmixed people anywhere) springing from a fusion between the negroid Papuans and a low type of Caucasians at a period when Australia formed a portion of the Asiatic continent. While re-affirming his opinion that the primary cause of exogamy remains a problem nearly as dark as ever,' and thus agreeing with Mr Fison, who 'abandons all hope of certain discovery of its origin,' Dr Frazer sees an approach to its solution in repugnance to the marriage of blood-relations, although it is impossible to suppose that, in planning it, these ignorant and improvident savages could have been animated by exact knowledge of its consequences.' As bearing on this, Father Martin Dobrizhoffer, writing in 1784, may be quoted.* "Though the paternal indulgence of the Roman Pontiffs makes the first and second degrees of relationship alone a bar to the marriage of the Indians, yet the Abipones, instructed by nature and the examples of their ancestors, abhor the very thought of marrying anyone related to them by the most distant tie of relationship. Long experience has convinced me that the respect for consanguinity, by which they are deterred from marrying into their own families, is implanted by nature in the minds of most of the people of Paraguay.' · The primary cause probably lies in the sexual jealousy of primitive man in his emergence from the protohuman stage, that passion being a dominant part of his animal heritage. In his Social Origins' Mr Andrew Lang included a posthumous essay on 'Primal Law' by his relative, Mr Atkinson, who had the advantage, through residence in the New Caledonian archipelago, of studying savage life on the spot. Among his books was The Descent of Man,' in which Darwin opposed the theory that sexual intercourse between the earliest human societies was promiscuous, and arguing' from the strength of the feeling of jealousy all through the animal kingdom, as well as from the analogy of the lower animals,' more particularly of the anthropoid apes, advanced as 'the more probable view that man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with a single wife, or, if powerful, with several, whom he jealously guarded against all other men.' It is on this hypothesis that Atkinson formulated his 'primal law of the family.' "The patriarch had only one enemy whom he should dread, an enemy with each coming year more and more to be feared -deadly rivals of his very own flesh and blood, and the fruit of his loins-namely, that neighbouring group of young males exiled by sexual jealousy from his own and similar neighbouring groups a youthful band of brothers living together in forest celibacy, or at most in polyandrous relation with some single female captive.' ('Why single?' asks Mr Lang.) ... The * An Account of the Abipones,' translated by Sara Coleridge (1822), ii, 212. ་ Ch. xx, section On the Causes which Prevent or Check the Action of Sexual Selection with Savages.' |