ther, to assist the
birth; and the god who happened to be invoked at the moment when the
child saw the light, was his god for life. As a rule, the god of the
father's family was prayed to first; so that generally, perhaps, a man
inherited the god of his father. But if the birth was tedious and
difficult, the god of the mother's family was next invoked. When the
child was born, the mother would call out, "To whom were you praying?"
and the god prayed to just before was carefully remembered, and his
incarnation duly acknowledged throughout the future life of the
child.[137] Such a mode of selecting a divine patron is totally
different from the mode whereby, under pure totemism, a person obtains
his totem; for his totem is automatically determined for him at birth,
being, in the vast majority of cases, inherited either from his father
or from his mother, without any possibility of variation or selection.
Lastly, the Samoan system differs from most, though not all, systems of
totemism, in that it is quite independent of exogamy; in other words,
there is no rule forbidding people who revere the same god to marry each
other.

[137] G. Turner, _Samoa_, pp. 17, 78 _sq._

Thus, while the Samoan worship of certain classes of natural objects,
especially species of animals, is certainly not pure totemism, it
presents points of analogy to that system, and might easily, we may
suppose, have been developed out of it, the feeling of kinship for
totemic animals and plants having been slowly transformed and sublimated
into a religious reverence for the creatures and a belief in their
divinity; while at the same time the clans, which were originally
intermixed, gradually sorted out from each other and settled down in
separate villages and districts. This gradual segregation of the clans
may have been facilitated by a change from maternal to paternal descent
of the totem; for when a man transmits his totem to his offspring, his
descendants in the male line tend naturally to expand into a local group
in which the totem remains constant from generation to generation
instead of alternating with each successive generation, as necessarily
happens when a man's children take their totem not from him but from
their mother. That the Samoan worship of _aitu_ was developed in some
such way out of simple totemism appears to have been the view of Dr.
George Brown, one of our best authorities on Samoan society and
religion; for he speaks without r