Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/416

 396 Tlie Origin of Totem Natnes and Beliefs.

them with peoples among whom the totem system had been developed, and to observe how some peoples took up these ideas and used them as the basis of their political and social system. Such a comparison, I think, would show us a great deal. Anthropologists have, 1 think, paid a great deal too little attention to the economic side of primitive m.an's necessities. I know of no treatise which deals exhaustively with the economical conditions of primitive man, and I cannot help feeling that when we understand what these economic conditions were, we may find in that direction an explanation of the origin of totemism. In the meantime, the admirable way in which Mr. Lang has put aside a large number of interesting ideas which have passed for good scientific theories of totemism is exactly what was wanted. He has done for these theories of totemism what he did in previous years for other theories of mythology.

Mr. Marett : I come from a place which I make bold to compare with a Greek city-state, and in which clannishness reigns supreme, the island of Jersey. There they always refer to the Guernseymen as " donkeys," whilst the Guern- seymen return the compliment by speaking of the Jersey- men as the " crapmids " ; crapaiid being the name of the enormous toad that frequents every lane in the island.^ Now when I was four or five years old, I had already come to realise that I was a crapaud, and the member of a society of crapaiids. And this, I fancy, rather altered my views as to the nature and status of the crapaud. Though objectively and in itself it might seem a somewhat odious beast, it became henceforth for me undoubtedly interesting, and, perhaps I might say, something towards which I had dim feelings of kinship. There were a certain number of superstitions that prevailed in my native place in regard to crapauds. I certainly was made to understand as a child that to hurt one of these animals in any kind of way would somehow be fatal to my future prospects. And this, I think, is, or was, the belief of the average Jerseyman.

Now the English and French,' in whom, so to speak, we islanders are not immediately interested, have, as far as I know, no animal nicknames amongst us. We keep these intimate sobriquets for home use, as it were. Wherefore I would hazard the conjecture that, supposing Mr. Lang's

' [The Guernsey people have a legend relating how St. Patrick banished all reptiles from their island. — Ed.]