Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/68

 58 controversy. The quiet non-combatant student is astonished to find himself in the theatre of war, and hardly knows where to seek a bomb-proof burrow that he may hide his head from the shells of their polemics.

One of the subjects on which recent inquiries have thrown most doubt is that of Totemism. We had looked upon Totemism as one of the most important and far-reaching of anthropological discoveries. We thought the theory solidly established, its foundations laid by Maclennan, its superstructure carefully erected by Dr. Frazer, and adapted by Robertson Smith and Dr. Jevons to the most modern requirements of theology. On a sudden two smashing blows are delivered, one by Dr. Franz Boas and the other by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen; and it seems there is hardly one stone of the fabric left upon another.

Dr. Boas has conducted for many years a remarkable series of investigations among the north-western tribes of Canada. The results have been given to the world partly in reports to the British Association, partly in publications of the Smithsonian Institution; and an important volume of stories has been issued by the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte. The monograph on the Kwakiutl Indians to which I want now to direct your attention was contained in the Annual Report of the National Museum at Washington for 1895, actually published in 1898.

I need not do more at the outset than remind you that totemism is a system having a religious and also a social side. The totem of a clan—it is with such only that we are concerned—is a class of material objects reverenced by a body of persons who believe themselves to be united to the totem and to one another by a special bond,