source in the barbaric belief in a vital connexion between man and the earth, whom in every tongue he has hymned as 'Mother.' Hunger, as the primal imperative need, brought his wits into play; and hence a body of magical rites as one among other devices to obtain the meat which perisheth'-rites which lie at the core of barbaric and pagan religions, and which, mutatis mutandis, survive in the harvest and allied festivals of Christendom.

6

The intervals which have elapsed between the revision and issue of successive editions of The Golden Bough have been filled by Dr Frazer with the collection of an enormous mass of material relating to the institutions of Totemism and Exogamy, filling four large volumes. The first of the three sections into which they are divided contains a reprint of Dr Frazer's scarce booklet, based on an article contributed to the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,' in which Dr Frazer confined himself to collecting and stating the facts.' This is followed by essays on the 'Origin of Totemism and on the Beginnings of Religion and Totemism' reprinted from the Fortnightly Review,' wherein, as their title implies, explanations of these institutions are suggested. The second and by far the largest division, filling a portion of the first and the whole of the second and third volumes, is crammed with examples from totemic areas thus far explored, that is, from the Tropics, the Southern Hemisphere, and North America, a bird's-eye view of the distribution of totemic peoples being supplied in the first of a series of excellent maps. The stupendous labour involved in this ethnographic survey and in the numerous Notes and Corrections' can be appreciated only by anthropological experts; the reader eager for results will limit himself to the concluding section, in which the origin of Totemism and Exogamy is discussed.

Totemism, as an institution, was first observed among the North American Indians; and from them the word is derived. It is a corruption of the Ojibway totam or toodaim, meaning 'my tribe,' and is defined by Dr Frazer as belief in an intimate relation between a group of kindred people on the one side and a species of natural or artificial objects on the other side, which objects are called the totems of the human group.' That relation is

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.
'Social Origins,' p. 138.

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.

6

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

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.