eighteenth century. Lafitau was perhaps the first writer who ever
explained certain features in Greek and other ancient myths and
practices as survivals from totemism. The Chimera, a composite
creature, lion, goat and serpent, might represent, Lafitau thought,
a league of three totem tribes, just as wolf, bear and turtle
represented the Iroquois League.


[1] Histoire de la France-Nouvelle, iii. 266.

[2] Introductio ad Latinam Blasoniam, by John Gibbon, Blue Mantle,
London, 1682. "The dancers, were painted some party per pale, gul
and sab, some party per fesse of the same colours;" whence Gibbon
concluded "that heraldry was ingrafted naturally into the sense of
the humane race".

[3] Vol. i. p. 356.

[4] Schoolcraft, v. 73.

[5] Ibid., iii. 268.

[6] Ibid., iv. 86.


The martyred Pere Rasles, again, writing in 1723,[1] says that one
stock of the Outaonaks claims descent from a hare ("the great hare
was a man of prodigious size"), while another stock derive their
lineage from the carp, and a third descends from a bear; yet they
do not scruple, after certain expiatory rites, to eat bear's flesh.