Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/398

378 savage, are blood relationships, and such relationship involves the duties which are recognised and performed. But how did the early groups come to be named after the plants and animals; the name suggesting the idea of connection, and the idea of connection involving the duties of the totemist to his totem, and of the totem to the totemist?

The names, I repeat, requiring and receiving mythical explanations, and the explanations necessarily suggesting conduct to match, are the causes of totemism. This theory is not a form of the philological doctrine, nomina numina. This is no case of disease of language, in Mr. Max Müller's sense of the words. A man is called a cat, all of his totem-kin are cats. The language is not diseased, but the man has to invent some reason for the name common to his kin. It is not even a case of Folk-Etymology, as when a myth is invented to explain the meaning of the name of a place, or person, or thing. Thus the loch of Duddingston, near Edinburgh, is explained by the myth that Queen Mary, as a child, used to play at "dudding" (or skipping) stones across the water, "making ducks and drakes." Or again, marmalade is derived from Marie malade. Queen Mary, as a child, was seasick in crossing to France, and asked for confiture of oranges, hence Marie malade—"marmalade." In both cases, the name to be explained is perverted. There is no real "stone" in Duddingston—"Duddings' town," the ton or tûn of the Duddings; while "marmalade" is a late form of "marmalet," a word older than Queen Mary's day.

An example of a folk-etymology bordering on totemism, is the supposed descent of Clan Chattan, and of the House of Sutherland, from the Wild Cat of their heraldic crests.