Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/403

 The Origin of Totem Names and Beliefs. 383

groups might fall collectively under each such local name. Again, it is as society moves away from totemism towards male kinship and settled abodes, that local names are given to human groups, as in Melanesia; or even to individuals, as in the case of the Arunta. Among them a child is "of " the place where he or she was born, like our de and Von} The piquancy of plant and animal names for groups probably hostile must also be considered. We are dealing with a stage of society far behind that of Mincopies, or Punans of Borneo, or Australians, and in imagining that the groups were as a rule hostile, we may or may not be making a false assumption. We are presuming that the jealousy of the elder males drove the younger males out of the group, or at least compelled them to bring in females from other groups, which would mean war. We are also assuming jealousy of all encroachments on feeding-grounds. These are the premises, which cannot be demonstrated, but only put in for the sake of argument. In any case no more hostility than our villages have for each other is enough to provide the giving of animal sobriquets.

On this point I may quote MM. Gaidoz and Sebillot {Blason Populaire de la France j Paris, Cerf, 1884) • " ^^^ all ages men have loved to speak ill of their neighbour: to blazon him, in the old phrase of a time when our speech was less prudish and more gay. Pleasantries were exchanged, not only between man and man, but between village and village. Sometimes in the expressive word, the defect, or the quality (usually the defect), the domi- nant and apparently hereditary trait of the people of a

race or a province, is stated in a kind of verbal

caricature Les hommes se sont done blasonnes de

tout le temps!^

De tout le temps ! MM. Gaidoz and Sebillot were not thinking of the origin of totemic names, but their theory

' Spencer and Gillen, p. 57, note.