Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/118

 92 Correspondence.

explanation, (and I have tried every other that my fancy can suggest), is that the present Arunta method of obtaining totems is not early, but recent, and has not yet wholly destroyed the usual method, by which each totem is confined to a single phratry. This is no new objection to Dr. Frazer's whole theory. No reply, to my knowledge, has ever been made, except a suggestion by Mr. Spencer, to which I have found no allusion in Dr. Frazer's book.

2 (pp. 390-1). Dr. Rivers did not find "conceptional totemism" in the Banks' islands. The natives understood the nature of procreation, and what Dr. Rivers found, I think, is but one method among others, also extant there, of getting an animal or vegetable familiar.

3 (P- 390- The large number of Arunta totems, — about 200 are known, — is a peculiarity of which I have no explanation to offer; nor can I guess why plant totems are so rare in South- Eastern Australia.

4 (PP- 392-3)- I had observed, before Mr. Thomas wrote, the apparent discrepancy in Dr. Frazer's view that his founders of exogamy recognised classificatory relationship only, and his other view that the founders of exogamy meant merely to bar the nearest consanguineous relations in marriage. Of course, before exogamy was instituted, there were not, and could not be, any classificatory relationships, — as Dr. Frazer seems to understand in a note in his fourth volume.

5 (?• 393)- I^ some tribes began by reckoning descent in the male line, and if the only object in barring certain unions was an objection to consanguineous unions, then the tribes which began with male descent recognised the male part in procreation. But they are supposed to have had no idea of the male rdle in begetting.

Omitting other points, on which I agree with Mr. Thomas, I also wonder that Dr. Frazer did not remark on the importance of one totem to one totem marriage in the most " primitive " tribes. If this was the earliest rule, the duality of the phratries in Aus- tralia, — two and not more, — was automatic and inevitable. This I pointed out, I think, in the Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor ; if I did not, it is an obvious corollary.