162 Primitive Theories of the Origin of Man 



men were about to catch fish near an Assiga town in Southern 

 Nigeria, the natives of the town objected, saying, " Our souls live in 

 those fish, and if you kill them we shall die 1 ." On another occasion, 

 in the same region, an Englishman shot a hippopotamus near a native 

 village. The same night a woman died in the village, and her friends 

 demanded and obtained from the marksman five pounds as compensa- 

 tion for the murder of the woman, whose soul or second self had been 

 in that hippopotamus 2 . Similarly at Ndolo, in the Congo region, we 

 hear of a chief whose life was bound up with a hippopotamus, but he 

 prudently suffered no one to fire at the animal 3 . 



Amongst people who thus fail to perceive any sharp line of 

 distinction between beasts and men it is not surprising to meet with 

 the belief that human beings are directly descended from animals. 

 Such a belief is often found among totemic tribes who imagine that 

 their ancestors sprang from their totemic animals or plants ; but it is 

 by no means confined to them. Thus, to take instances, some of the 

 Californian Indians, in whose mythology the coyote or prairie-wolf is 

 a leading personage, think that they are descended from coyotes. At 

 first they walked on all fours ; then they began to have some 

 members of the human body, one finger, one toe, one eye, one ear, 

 and so on ; then they got two fingers, two toes, two eyes, two ears, 

 and so forth ; till at last, progressing from period to period, 

 they became perfect human beings. The loss of their tails, 

 which they still deplore, was produced by the habit of sitting upright 4 . 

 Similarly Darwin thought that " the tail has disappeared in man and 

 the anthropomorphous apes, owing to the terminal portion having 

 been injured by friction during a long lapse of time ; the basal and 

 embedded portion having been reduced and modified, so as to 

 become suitable to the erect or semi-erect position 5 ." The Turtle 

 clan of the Iroquois think that they are descended from real 

 mud turtles which used to live in a pool. One hot summer the 

 pool dried up, and the mud turtles set out to find another. A very 

 fat turtle, waddling after the rest in the heat, was much incommoded 

 by the weight of his shell, till by a great eifort he heaved it off 

 altogether. After that he gradually developed into a man and 

 became the progenitor of the Turtle clan 6 . The Crawfish band of the 



1 Charles Partridge, Cross River Natives (London, 1905), pp. 225 s^. 

 1 C. H. Robinson, Hausaland (London, 1896), pp. 36 sq. 



3 Notes Analytiques sur les Collections Ethnographiques du Musee du Congo, i. 

 (Brussels, 190206), p. 150. 



4 H. B. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, iv. (Philadelphia, 1856), 

 pp. 224 nq. ; compare id. v. p. 217. The descent of some, not all, Indians from coyotes 

 is mentioned also by Friar Boscana, in [A. Robinson's] Life in California (New York, 

 1846), p. 299. 



6 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Second Edition (London, 1879), p. 60. 

 8 E. A. Smith, "Myths of the Iroquois," Second Annual Report of the Bureau of 

 Ethnology (Washington, 1883), p. 77. 



