[4] Brough Smyth, i. 449.

[5] J. J. Atkinson's MS.

[6] Sahagun, ii. viii. 250; Bancroft, iii. 111. Compare stories of
women who give birth to animals in Melusine, 1886, August-November.
The Batavians believe that women, when delivered of a child, are
frequently delivered at the same time of a young crocodile as a
twin. Hawkesworth's Voyages, iii. 756. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde,
p. 17 et seq.

[7] Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 497.


These are minor examples of a form of opinion which is so strong
that it is actually the chief constituent in savage society. That
society, whether in Ashantee or Australia, in North America or
South Africa, or North Asia or India, or among the wilder tribes of
ancient Peru, is based on an institution generally called
"totemism". This very extraordinary institution, whatever its
origin, cannot have arisen except among men capable of conceiving
kinship and all human relationships as existing between themselves
and all animate and inanimate things. It is the rule, and not the
exception, that savage societies are founded upon this belief. The
political and social conduct of the backward races is regulated in
such matters as blood-feud and marriage by theories of the actual
kindred and connection by descent, or by old friendship, which men
have in common with beasts, plants, the sun and moon, the stars,
and even the wind and the rain. Now, in whatever way this belief
in such relations to beasts and plants may have arisen, it