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W. Robertson Smith, who died in 1894, was a physicist, philologist, Bible critic, and archaeologist, a many-sided as well as keen and free thinking man, expressed the assumption in his work on the “Religion of the Semites,” published in 1889, that a peculiar ceremony, the so-called totem feasts had, from the very beginning, formed an integral part of the totemic system. For the support of this supposition he had at his disposal at that time only a single description of such an act from the year 500 A. D.; he knew, however, how to give a high degree of probability to his assumption through his analysis of the nature of sacrifice among the old Semites. As sacrifice assumes a godlike person we are dealing here with an inference from a higher phase of religious rite to its lowest phase in totemism.

I shall now cite from Robertson Smith’s excellent book those statements about the origin and meaning of the sacrificial rite which are of great interest to us; I shall omit the only too numerous tempting details as well as the parts dealing with all later developments. In such an excerpt it is quite impossible to give the