Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/445

 Totemism, and Religion. 409

" Communal marriage " could produce no such family of an individual.

But, deserting his patriarchal theory of the origin of the totem-clan, Lord Avebury (p. 99) answers Mr. Fison's objec- tion to that theory, — if the name (Bear or Lion) " were first given to an individual, his family, i.e. his children, could not inherit it from him when descent is reckoned on the female side." To this Lord Avebury replies that, "there must, I submit, have been a still earlier stage" (than female descent of the name) *' when children were not regarded as specially related either to the father or the mother, but only as part of the horde. Mr. Fison's. . . objection " (which is also Mr. Tylor's,) "therefore falls to the ground."

Here I understand Lord Avebury to mean that he now conceives totemism to have arisen in his age of "communal marriage," when fathers and their children were unknown quantities. But he had previously declared that totemism arose out of the adoption by children oithoir father s animal name. Against that opinion of Lord Avebury, and not against the opinion that totemism began in an age of com- munal marriage, Mr. Fison was arguing.

Therefore I must agree with Mr. Fison's and Mr. Tylor's objection. Their objection is to Lord Avebury 's statements that " the children and folloivers of a man called the Bear or the Lion would make that a tribal name ; " that totemism " arose from the practice of naming, first individuals, and then their families, after particular animals." ^^

Lord Avebury cannot mean to tell us, first, that totemism arose from inheritance by families of the personal names of their fathers ; and then that totemism arose when children were not regarded as related either to father or mother, "but only as part of the horde" (p. 99). If he adheres to his second theory, (and he still cites his first as a theory which he holds, pp. 87, 97), how did a "horde" acquire the hereditary name of " Bear " or '' Lion " }

^-Avebury, pp. 87, 97.