Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/110

 84 Correspondence.

among the lowest totemic race is necessarily of a more primitive type than the totemism of savages who have reached a somewhat higher degree of general culture. It is worth noticing that the ideas on which Wilken and the American anthropologists have based their theories are not above the intellect even of the Austra- lian aborigines. The Dieri are reported to show great reverence for certain trees, which are believed to be their fathers trans- formed, and the belief in personal guardian spirits prevails among many Australian tribes.

My doubts as to the presumption that totemism has everywhere originated in the same way do not, however, extend to Dr. Frazer's parallel view regarding the origin of exogamy. This is a very different case. It is one of the many merits of Dr. Frazer's book that he has definitely separated exogamy from totemism and thereby, it is to be hoped, saved us from further speculations about the totemic origin of the exogamous rules. I also agree with his view that these rules have sprung from an aversion to the marriages of near kin. But, whilst Dr. Frazer thinks that exo- gamy was deliberately instituted for the purpose of preventing the sexual unions of near kin, my own belief is that the aversion to such unions, through an association of ideas, led to the prohibitions of marriage between members of the same clan on account of the notion of intimacy connected with a common descent and a com- mon name. This theory, which calls in the law of association to explain clan exogamy, is strongly supported by the circumstance that various other prohibitions of intermarriage have obviously originated in a very similar way. How could anybody deny the operation of the law of association, for instance, in the Roman Catholic prohibition of marriage between co-sponsors, or in the rule prevalent in Eastern Europe, according to which the grooms- man at a wedding is forbidden to intermarry with the family of the bride, or in laws prohibiting marriage between relatives by alliance? Why, then, might not the same law have acted upon other relation- ships also, such as those constituted by a common descent or a common name ? As for the influence of the name, I may refer to the fact that the Chinese Penal Code punishes with sixty blows any one who marries a person with his own surname, although among the entire Chinese population of the Empire there are