Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/239

 ANIMAL SUPERSTITIONS AND TOTEMISM.

BY N. W. THOMAS, M.A.

(Read at Meeting of April 25th, 1900.)

[The MS. notes (indicated by a †) are from the following ladies and gentlemen, to whom I here offer my most sincere thanks for their assistance:

Frau Eysn, Salzburg; Oberleutnant z. S. Fischer, Kiel; Herr Gander and Prof. Jentsch, Guben; Herr Gutekunst, Reutlingen; Frau, Fräulein, and Fräulein Greta Meyersahm, Kiel; Herr Lorenzen, Neumünster; Herr C. Stinde, Leusahn. My especial thanks are due to Dr. Feilberg for many citations from books inaccessible to me, and to Herr Jühling for MS. contributions and the advance sheets of his valuable work, Tiermedizin. I wish also to acknowledge my great indebtedness to Mr. Gomme; the Irish evidence in the first section is drawn entirely from his valuable papers in the Archæological Review, on which I based my further researches.

A bibliography of the works most frequently quoted will be found at the end of the article.]

has been found as a living cult in only two considerable areas of the world's surface—North America and Australia. For the majority of the human race it is, at most, an "uberwundener Standpunkt," perhaps not even that, for authoritative voices have been raised to deny both its extensive distribution in the past and its importance in the history of religion.

The evidence for the former existence of Totemism, as of all other forgotten stages of man's development, must be sought in survivals. A survival is a belief, custom, or institution whose origin and meaning are lost; its explanation is to be found sometimes in history, sometimes in those prehistoric days whose history has to be written by the aid of folklore.

In speaking to this society I need not do more than allude