Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/186

 1 70 The Origin of Exogamy and Toteniism.

primitive men, but I have demonstrated that, among all sort and conditions of men in our experience, the process is a vera causa.

Dismissing- my theory, Mr. Howitt, in place of it, " could more easily imagine that these early savages might, through dreams, have developed the idea of relation- ship with animals, or even with plants."-''

That animal nicknames, given from without, can be and are accepted in Australia Mr. Howitt seems to think possible in his own book, in the very page in which he says that the fact "seems to him most improbable." He writes, "The hypothesis suggested by Professor H addon is that groups of people, at a very early period, by reason of their local environment, would have special varieties of food. This receives support from the fact that analogous names obtain now in certain tribes, e.g. the Yuin." If this be the case, my theory is so far accepted ; groups may and do receive names from their articles of food. How the steps respecting the animals or other objects, denoted by the names of the human groups, would be taken, I have shown. But I cannot find that Mr. Howitt gives any examples of such group- sobriquets among the Yuin and other tribes. Some Yuin personal names are Thunder, Stone-tomahawk, and so forth ; the " family " names are place-names.-' The elderly Kurnai receive personal nicknames from the animals which they are skilled in catching, as Bunjil-tanibun, " Good man perch." -^ I repeat that nobody could find "groups'" accepting new animal nicknames now, as the totem " groups " are, of course, already named Cat or Dingo or Iguana and so forth.

Meanwhile Mr. Haddon's suggestion, made in the same year (1902) as my own, is really a form of my own, differing in so far as he derives the group sobriquets entirely from articles of food in the area of the group ; and supposes the group-folk to have lived mainly on the object, and bartered -" Op. cit., p. 154. -' Op. cit., p. 739. -"^ Ibid., p. 73S.