Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/208

196 animals for sustenance or of burden-bearing animals by whose aid fresh, game areas may be readily occupied. The persistent nomads—e.g., the Arabs—have possessed both kinds of animals. The Indians had neither. The large majority of the historic Indians never saw a horse until centuries after the Columbian discovery. The Dakota, Comanche, and some other tribes became nomads adventitiously, and only after the introduction of the horse by Europeans. The means of subsistence of these tribes in a nomadic life were afterward increased by their obtaining firearms.

The pastoral stage also depended upon the possession of some of the animals mentioned. It expedited the transition of the Israelites from savagery to barbarism, but it was not experienced by the Indians. Therefore, supposing that the two peoples were at one time equally advanced in culture, it might well have required three thousand years longer for the Indians to reach the stage in which they were discovered than for the Israelites to attain to the culture shown in the days of the Judges.

At the time taken for proper comparison between the two peoples, which has before been designated, both were living under the clan or totemic system, which was formerly called the gentile system.

A clan is a body of kindred in which kinship is established by laws now long disused, and so strange to our present ideas as to be comprehended with difficulty. Some of the more salient features of the system appear in the division of the people into tribes which are interpermeated by clans, with special rules of government, adoption, punishment, protection, property, and marriage.

The totemic stage was first intelligently noticed among the aborigines of America and Australia, and typical representations of it are still found among them. In Australia it is called kobong. An animal or a plant, or sometimes a heavenly body, is connected with all persons of a certain stock, who believe that it is their totem, their protecting daimon. They regard themselves as descendants of the totem, and they bear its name. The line of descent is normally female. When a clan becomes dominant, its totem daimon prevails together with it, and commands the worship of all the clans or tribes in the group, the daimons of other clans and tribes becoming subordinate.

The clan system, lately found in actual force in two large geographic divisions of the world, has preserved a clew to the moldered maze of man's early institutions. What is now known of the clans, tribes, and league of the Iroquois explains what was formerly mystical about the tribes of Israel.

Each clan or tribe took as a badge or objective totem the representation of the totemic daimon from which it was named.