Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/210

193 state. The Indians did not gain such, a conservative bond, and the alliances of their tribes were more loose and transient.

The characteristics of the Israelite and of the Indian, as of the Homeric Achæans and of the extant Bedouins, were predatory. The tribe and its clans, with their occasional allies, went forth against the rest of the world.

In the investigation of totemism among the Israelites it is important to observe its continued existence in Arabia, because the state of society there still remains more primitive than that prevalent in the land of Israel even at the time of imposing antiquity when the Old Testament was written.

A large number of tribes having animal names are still found among the Arabs. Some of these tribal names are Lion, Wolf, Ibex, She-fox, Dog, Bull, Ass, Hyena, and Lizard. The origin of all these names is referred by the people to an ancestor who bore the tribal or gentile name. The animal names given in the tribal genealogies are also often found belonging to sub-tribes, the same animal name sometimes occurring in subdivisions of different tribes. These particulars correspond with the Indian clan system.

The tribes of the southern and eastern parts of Canaan had affinities both to Israel and to the Arabs. The Arab princes of Midian were The Raven and The Wolf—heads of tribes of the same names. More than one third of the Horites, the descendants of Seir the He-goat, bear animal names; so do the clans of the Edomites. The real name of Moses's father-in-law is in dispute, but he had some connection with the Kenites. The list in Genesis xxxvi is a count of tribal or local divisions and not a literal genealogy. It is full of animal names. The Antelope stock was divided over the nation in a way only to be explained on the totemic and not on a genealogic system. The same names of totem tribes that appear in Arabia, reach through Edom, Midian, and Moab into Canaan, where they show local distribution, which is intelligible only on the assumption that the totemic system prevailed there also when the first books of the Old Testament were written.

Prof. Robertson Smith gives a select list of about thirty persons and towns in point, bearing names derived from animals and plants. Dr. Joseph Jacobs has expanded that list into a hundred and sixty such names, though he considers their importance to be lessened by the frequency of such names in England, forgetting, apparently, that the clan system also existed among the ancestors of the English people.

The twenty-sixth chapter of Numbers gives the clans of the Israelite tribes. Altogether seventy-two clans are mentioned, and of these at least ten occur in two tribes, among which the Arodites or Wild Ass clan, found both in Gad and in Benjamin, should be