Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/376

356 regarded as "relatives and protectors," and it is explained that, in the past, a human ancestor had an adventure with this or that animal, whence he assumed his totem armorial bearings. In precisely the same way a myth, a very late myth, was invented about the adventure of a Stewart with a lion, to account for the Lyon of the Stewarts. The Haidas and Thlinkets, believing as they do that human souls are reborn human, cannot hold that a bestial soul animates a man, say, of the Raven totem. The Arunta, on the other hand, suppose that the souls of animals which evolved into human beings, are reincarnated in each child born to the tribe. "Two clans of Western Australia, who are named after a small opossum and a little fish, think that they are so called because they used to live chiefly on these creatures." This myth has some support in modern opinion; the kins, it is argued, received their totem names from the animals and plants which mainly formed their food supply, though now their totems are sparingly eaten by them. These legends and others are clearly ætiological myths, like the Samoan hypothesis that gods are incarnate in the totems. The myths merely try to explain the original connection. between men and totems, and are constructed on the lines of savage ideas about the relations of all things in the universe, all alike being personal, and rational, and capable of inter-breeding, and of shape-shifting. Certain Kalamantans of Sarawak will not eat a species of deer, because "an ancestor became a deer of this kind." All such fables, of course, are valueless as history; and, in the savage stage of the intellect, such myths were inevitable.

Mr. McLennan himself at first had a theory, which, as far as I heard him speak of it, was more or less akin to my