Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/179

III Dr. Frazer's views are, shortly, as follows. The Intichiuma ceremonies appear to indicate that each totem group was charged with the superintendence of some department of nature, from which it took its name. The control was by magical means to procure for the members of the community, on the one hand, a plentiful supply of all the commodities of which they stood in need; and, on the other hand, an immunity from all the perils and dangers to which man is exposed in his struggle with nature.

Dr. J. G. Frazer informs me that this view was first suggested by him in a letter to Professor Baldwin Spencer in the autumn of 1898, in reply to which the latter informed him that he had been coming to the same conclusion.

Accordingly, when Professor Baldwin Spencer visited England afterwards, he read the paper already quoted, which contained the views of Mr. Gillen and himself.

Thus Dr. Frazer independently arrived at the same conclusion, and raised the same hypothesis as to the primary functions of the pristine groups.

This hypothesis takes us back far into the time when the function of each totem group was to secure the multiplication of the particular object the name of which it bore.

But the totem group is seen there to be fully formed, and the question still remains, How was it that men assumed the names of objects, which in fact must have been the commencement of totemism?

It is to this aspect of the question that Mr. Andrew Lang has addressed himself especially. He holds that the problem of the commissariat must have kept the pristine groups very small. They were at first anonymous, and each group would need a special name for each of its unfriendly neighbours. He considers that as likely as not there would be animal names given for various reasons. Thus the plant and animal names would be impressed upon each group from without, and some of them would stick, would be stereotyped, and each group would come to answer to its nickname.