Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/354

 344 '^^^ Religious Basis of Social Union.

invicem vitabundi. Primitive man has not the least wish to fight if he can help it ; man is a compromising or contract-making animal almost from the very first, and it would be surprising if in this respect he fell below the ability and intelligence of the pariah dogs of India or old Constantinople. He knows the limits of his hunting area, and (to keep out the reprisals of unwelcome strangers and visitors) will respect his neighbour's landmark with com- mendable self-restraint.

6. At this point enter those perplexing questions of totemism, and the nomenclature of tribe and phratry, about which I will only say this: distinctions naturally arose (i) when the sons of the same father by different wives had to be discriminated, (2) when an alien element was admitted in the suitors for the Aboriginal Sisters and the tribal clients, (3) during the period of wife-capture between hostile neighbours, (4) when two groups were fused (as at Rome) to produce two inter- marrying divisions for the fixed exogamous rule. I only briefly add that the -mystical and religious connotation of the totem seems to be a later product of leisured reflection and, as many may think, of perverted ingenuity. At first, at least, the animal-names must have been distinctive epithets, emblems, symbols, what you will, supplied perhaps as nicknames or sou- briquets from without (as Dr. Lang passionately argued up to his last moment), adopted by the sufl"erers from this rude wit, and translated into tattooing, gesture-languages, and the blazonry of honourable and heraldic device.

7. We see that purely natural affection will not account for the group ; the sire did not wish his grown-up sons to stay near the pristine seraglio, and only admitted them with reluctance and suspicion : a vast proportion of folk- stories turn on the fortunes of sons expelled to seek their fortune, and finding heiresses waiting for them in primal families similarly dispossessed of adult males. Again the Brethren only hold together because they are stronger in