crest,
and kinship is kinship in the wolf, bear, potato, or whatever other
object is recognised as the original ancestor. Finally, as a general
rule, the stock-name is derived through the mother, and where it is
derived through the father there are proofs that the custom is
comparatively modern. It will be acknowledged that this sort of
kindred, which is traced to a beast, bird, or tree, which is
recognised in every person bearing the same stock-name, which is
counted through females, and which governs marriage customs, is not
the sort of kindred that would naturally arise among people regulated
on the patriarchal or monandrous family system. Totemism, however, is
a widespread institution prevailing all over the north of the American
continent, also in Peru (according to Garcilasso de la Vega); in
Guiana (the negroes have brought it from the African Gold Coast, where
it is in full force, as it also is among the Bechuanas); in India
among Hos, Garos, Kassos, and Oraons; in the South Sea Islands, where
it has left strong traces in Mangaia; in Siberia, and especially in
the great island continent of Australia. The Semitic evidences for
totemism (animal-worship, exogamy, descent claimed through females)
are given by Professor Robertson Smith, in the _Journal of Philology_,
ix. 17, _Animal Worship and Animal Tribes among the Arabs, and in the
Old Testament_. Many other examples of totemism might be adduced
(especially from Egypt), but we must restrict ourselves to the
following questions:--

1. What light is thrown on the original form of the family by
totemism? 2. Where we find survivals of totemism among civilised
races, may we conclude that these races (through scarcity of women)
had once been organised on other than the patriarchal model?

As to the first question, we must remember that the origin and
determining causes of totemism are still unknown. Mr. M'Lennan's
theory of the origin of totemism has never been published.[222] It may
be said without indiscretion that Mr. M'Lennan once thought totemism
arose at a period when ideas of kinship scarcely existed at all. 'Men
only thought of marking one off from another,' as Garcilasso de la
Vega says: the totem was but a badge worn by all the persons who found
themselves existing in close relations; perhaps in the same cave or
set of caves. People united by contiguity, and by the blind sentiment
of kinship not yet brought into explicit consciousness, might mark
themselves