ly begins; how many revolutions of thought they underwent,
how much they learnt and took over from earlier inhabitants of the
country in which they finally settled, we cannot even guess. As I said
in the last lecture, we have no really ancient history of the Romans, as
we have, for example, of the Egyptians or Babylonians; to us it is all
darkness, save where a little light has been thrown on the buried strata
by archaeology and anthropology. That little light, which may be
expected to increase in power, shows survivals here and there of
primitive modes of thought; and these I propose to deal with now in the
following order. _Totemism_ I shall mention merely to clear it out of
the way; but _taboo_ will take us some little time, and so will _magic_
in its various forms.

About totemism all I have to say is this. As I write, Dr. Frazer's great
work on this subject has just appeared; it is entirely occupied with
totemism among modern savages, true totemic peoples, with the object of
getting at the real principles of that curious stratum of human thought,
and he leaves to others the discussion of possible survivals of it among
Aryans, Semites, and Egyptians. He himself is sceptical about all the
evidence that has been adduced to prove its existence in classical
antiquity (see vol. i. p. 86 and vol. iv. p. 13). Under these
circumstances, and seeing that Dr. Frazer has always been the accepted
exponent of totemism in this country since the epoch-making works
appeared of Tylor and Robertson Smith, it is obviously unnecessary for
me either to attempt to explain what it is, or to examine the attempts
to find survivals of it in ancient Italy. When it first became matter of
interest to anthropologists it was only natural that they should be apt
to find it everywhere. Dr. Jevons, for example, following in the steps
of Robertson Smith, found plenty of totemistic survivals both in Greece
and Italy in writing his valuable _Introduction to the History of
Religion_; but he is now aware that he went too far in this direction.
Quite recently there has been a run after the same scent in France; not
long ago a French scholar published a book on the ensigns of the Roman
army,[23] which originally represented certain animals, and using Dr.
Frazer's early work on totemism with a very imperfect knowledge of the
subject, tried to prove that these were originally totem signs. Roman
names of families and old Italian tribe-names are still often quot