When a woman becomes aware of the life of the child she bears, among
the Arunta and Kaitish, she supposes that a local spirit of the local
totem has entered her, and her child's totem is therefore the totem of
that locality, whatever other totems she and her husbands may own. The
stone amulet of the ancestral spirit, WHO IS THE CHILD, is sought; if
it cannot be found at the spot, a wooden CHURINGA is made to represent
it, and it is kept carefully in a sacred storehouse.

Even in the centre and north, where the belief in reincarnation
prevails, this odd manner of acquiring totems is only practised by the
Arunta tribes and the Kaitish, and only among them are the inscribed
stones known to exist as favoured haunts of ancestral spirits desiring
incarnation. The other northern tribes believe in reincarnation, but
not in the haunted sacred stones, which they do not, north of the
Worgaia, possess; nor do they derive totems from locality, but, as
usual, by inheritance.

It thus appears that these Arunta sacred stones are an inseparable
accident of the Arunta method of acquiring the totem. How they and the
faith in them cause that method is not obvious, but the two things--the
haunted sacred stone, and the local source of totems--are
inseparable--that is, the former never is found apart from the latter.
Now such stones, with the sense and usage attached to them, cannot well
be primitive. They are the result of the peculiar and strictly isolated
Arunta custom and belief, which gives to each man and woman one of
these stones, the property of himself or herself, since the mythical
age, through all reincarnations.

One cannot see how such an unique custom and belief, associated with