ideas is discovered among the Bonis of Guiana. These
people were originally West Coast Africans imported as slaves, who have
won their freedom with the sword. While they retain a rough belief in
Gadou (God) and Didibi (the devil), they are divided into totem stocks
with animal names. The red ape, turtle and cayman are among the chief
totems.(11)

(1) Kip, ii. 288.

(2) Appendix B.

(3) See translation in Hakluyt Society's Collection.

(4) Like many Greek heroes. Odyssey, iii. 489. "Orsilochus, the child
begotten of Alpheus."

(5) Comm. Real., i. 75.

(6) Ibid., 53.

(7) Ibid., 102.

(8) Ibid., 83.

(9) Cieza de Leon (Hakluyt Society), p. 183.

(10) Acuna, p. 103; Wallace, Travels on Amazon (1853), pp. 481-506.

(11) Crevaux, Voyages dans l'Amerique du Sud, p. 59.

After this hasty examination of the confused belief in kinship with
animals and other natural objects which underlies institutions in
Australia, West and South Africa, North and South America, we may glance
at similar notions among the non-Aryan races of India. In Dalton's
Ethnology of Bengal,(1) he tells us that the Garo clans are divided into
maharis or motherhoods. Children belong to the mahari of the mother,
just as (in general) they derive their stock name and totem from the
mother's side in Australia and among the North American Indians. No man
may marry (as among the Red Indians and Australians) a woman belonging
to his own stock, motherhood or mahari. So far the maharis of Bengal
exactly correspond to the totem kindred. But do the Maharis also take
their names from plants and animals, and so forth? We know that the
Killis, similar communities among the Bengal Hos and Mundos, do this.(2)
"The Mundaris, like the Oraons, adopt as their tribal distinction the
name of some animal, and the flesh of that animal is tabooed to them as
food; for example, the eel, the tortoise." This is exactly the state of
things in Ashanti. Dalton mentions also(3) a princely family in Nagpur
which claims descent from "a great hooded snake". Among the Oraons he
found(4) tribes which might not eat young mice (considered a dainty) or
tortoises, and a stock which might not eat the oil of the tree which
was their totem, nor even sit in its shade. "The family or tribal names"
(within which they may not marry) "are usually those of animals or
plants, and when this is the case, the flesh of some part of the animal
or the fruit of the tree is tabooed to the tribe cal