Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/432

 390 Reviews.

which she saw at the moment when she first became aware that she was to bear a child, and to believe that the object, what- ever it was, actually entered her body and then came into the world again, the same but transformed into the semblance of a human being. (2), Exogamy was instituted by the wise men of a tribe to guard against the evils which threatened the community from the practice of intermarriage between near relatives. These evils were not of a kind to appeal to the biologist ; a superstition hitherto unrecorded by observers of primitive tribes, but possibly discoverable, caused man to believe that these evils would be caused by marriages between near kin.

It is clear that a good deal turns upon the validity of Dr. Frazer's belief that the Central Australian tribes are more primitive as regards totemism and exogamy than any other. If their totemism was at one time hereditary and has ceased to be so, it is permissible to suppose that their theories of conception, which hang so closely together with their totemism, have also undergone changes, possibly fundamental.

Now it appears to be a well-established fact that, although the totem kins of the Arunta are not at the present day so arranged that each kin lies wholly within one moiety, or class, of the tribe, yet the majority of members of any one kin do actually belong to a single moiety ; how Dr. Frazer explains this we cannot tell, if indeed he admits the fact; but it is evident that some explanation is wanted, for the prima facie reason for such a condition is that the totem kins were originally divided between the moieties, as in other tribes, but that these tribes were led to abandon the hereditary principle in totemism, while they retained it in the classes. Much has been written on the subject of Australian totemism and marriage customs, and Dr. Frazer may be well advised to avoid controversies in a work already bulky, but he cannot afford to neglect crucial points of this kind.

It is true that Dr. Frazer cites Dr. Rivers in support of his view that an even more primitive totemism is found in the Banks Islands than in Central Australia, and in the Banks Islands there appears to be no evidence that totems were ever hereditary ; our author, therefore, may have felt himself to some extent absolved