o skin them. In
New Caledonia, when a child tries to kill a lizard, the men warn him to
"beware of killing his own ancestor".(5) The Zulus spare to destroy a
certain species of serpents, believed to be the spirits of kinsmen, as
the great snake which appeared when Aeneas did sacrifice was held to
be the ghost of Anchises. Mexican women(6) believed that children born
during an eclipse turn into mice. In Australia the natives believe
that the wild dog has the power of speech; whoever listens to him is
petrified; and a certain spot is shown where "the wild dog spoke and
turned the men into stone";(7) and the blacks run for their lives as
soon as the dog begins to speak. What it said was "Bones".

(1) Kalewala, in La Finlande, Leouzon Le Duc (1845), vol. ii. p. 100;
cf. also the Introduction.

(2) Schoolcraft, v. 420.

(3) See similar ceremonies propitiatory of the bear in Jewett's
Adventures among the Nootkas, Edinburgh, 1824.

(4) Brough Smyth, i. 449.

(5) J. J. Atkinson's MS.

(6) Sahagun, ii. viii. 250; Bancroft, iii. 111. Compare stories of
women who give birth to animals in Melusine, 1886, August-November. The
Batavians believe that women, when delivered of a child, are frequently
delivered at the same time of a young crocodile as a twin. Hawkesworth's
Voyages, iii. 756. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 17 et seq.

(7) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 497.

These are minor examples of a form of opinion which is so strong that
it is actually the chief constituent in savage society. That society,
whether in Ashantee or Australia, in North America or South Africa,
or North Asia or India, or among the wilder tribes of ancient Peru,
is based on an institution generally called "totemism". This very
extraordinary institution, whatever its origin, cannot have arisen
except among men capable of conceiving kinship and all human
relationships as existing between themselves and all animate and
inanimate things. It is the rule, and not the exception, that savage
societies are founded upon this belief. The political and social conduct
of the backward races is regulated in such matters as blood-feud and
marriage by theories of the actual kindred and connection by descent, or
by old friendship, which men have in common with beasts, plants, the sun
and moon, the stars, and even the wind and the rain. Now, in whatever
way this belief in such relations to beasts and plants may have arisen,
it undoubtedly testifies to