o be regarded as ancestors, and the totem-clans,
retaining their sentiment of kinship, accounted for it by supposing
themselves to be descended from a common ancestor. They thus also
came to base the belief in clan-kinship on the tie of consanguinity
recognised in the family, which had by now come into existence. This
late and secondary form of totemism is that which obtains in India,
where the migratory and hunting stage has long been passed. The Indian
evidence is, however, of great value because we find here in the same
community, occasionally in the same caste, exogamous clans which
trace their descent sometimes from animals and plants, or totems,
and sometimes from gods, heroes, or titular ancestors, while many
of the clans are named after villages or have names to which no
meaning can be attached. As has been seen, there is good reason to
suppose that all these forms of the exogamous clan are developed from
the earliest form of the totem-clan; and since this later type of
clan has developed from the totem-clan in India, it is a legitimate
deduction that wherever elsewhere exogamous clans are found tracing
their descent from a common ancestor or with unintelligible names,
probably derived from places, they were probably also evolved from
the totem-clan. This type of clan is shown in Professor Hearn's _Aryan
Household_ to have been the common unit of society over much of Europe,
where no traces of the existence of totemism are established. [98]
And from the Indian analogy it is therefore legitimate to presume
that the totem-clan may have been the original unit of society among
several European races as well as in America, Africa, Australia and
India. Similar exogamous clans exist in China, and many of them have
the names of plants and animals. [99]

52. Animate Creation.

In order to render clear the manner in which the clan named after a
totem animal (or, less frequently, a plant) came to hold its members
akin both to each other and their totem animals, an attempt may be
made to indicate, however briefly and imperfectly, some features
of primitive man's conception of nature and life. Apparently when
they began dimly to observe and form conscious mental impressions
of the world around them, our first ancestors made some cardinal,
though natural and inevitable, mistakes. In the first place they
thought that the whole of nature was animate, and that every animal,
plant, or natural object which they saw around