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186 a spirit and not merely as a bear, eagle, wolf, etc., which are after all, but the objective links between the individual and the source of spiritual power. A very considerable number of objects in our museum collections are the material bonds between warriors and these personal guardians, usually classed under the technical name of medicine objects, or charms. Particularly among the tribes of the Mississippi Valley, these often form small bundles with short rituals and in some cases we find these accompanied by series of larger and more complex bundles often rising to the level of tribal ceremonies. The Pawnee, for example, have a hierarchy of these bundles extending from the tribe down to family groups. The center for this special bundle development seems to be about the Great Lakes in the Central Algonkin sphere of influence, but it has its analogies in the tribes of the Lower Mississippi and the Pueblos of the Rio Grande. Further, we note that certain Aztec legends mention two bundles miraculously handed down to the people in the days of their tribal migrations. Each of the two main divisions of the Aztec took one of these bundles for its chief guidance. As to the contents of these bundles, we are not fully enlightened, but one contained a crystal of some kind and the other a set of fire sticks, reminding us of Pawnee bundles. We must suspect, therefore, that the ritualistic bundle is an old and fundamental development in North American culture, and that it is based upon the much less specialized and more widely distributed concept of the individual guardian.

In the extended discussions of totemism by Frazer and others this generalized concept of the relation between the New World native and his animal-like guardians is elevated to the plane of an explanatory theory, often called the "American theory of totemic origin." However, the leading American students of the subject are disposed to regard this theory as accounting for facts peculiar to the New World totemic systems rather than as universal in application. Even in the New World, exceptions have been cited to show that similar totemic complexes seem to have had very different histories and so have superficial similarity. Facts of this tenor have