X.] THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 397 



made up the Bear society ; those to whom the Thunder or Water 

 beings had come formed the Thunder or the Pebble society. 

 The membership came from every kinship group in the tribe, 

 blood relationship was ignored, the bond of union being a 

 common right in a common vision 1 ." The system may have 

 been later influenced and modified by visions and other shaman- 

 istic practices ; but its origin lies behind all such developments, 

 behind all strictly religious notions, and it was at first a mere 

 device for distinguishing one individual from another, one family 

 or clan group from another. Thus amongst the Piaroas of the 

 Orinoco below San Fernando de Atabapo, the belief holds that 

 the tapir, originally the totem of the clan, has become their 

 ancestor, and that after death the spirit of every Piaroa passes 

 into a tapir ; hence they never hunt or eat this animal, and they 

 also think all the surrounding tribes are in the same way each 

 provided with their special animal forefather 2 . It is easy to see 

 how such ideas tend to cluster round the clan or family totem, at 

 first a distinguishing badge, later a protecting or tutelar deity of 

 Protean form. It should be remembered that the personal or 

 family name precedes the totem, which grows out of it, as seen by 

 the conditions still prevailing amongst the very lowest peoples 

 (Fuegians, Papuans of Torres Strait 3 ). 



Students of the Siouan social system distinguish carefully 

 between the clan, the gens, and the phratry, and 

 base their theories of the matriarchate and patri- 

 archate (descent through the female and the male 

 line) on this distinction, the assumption being that in all cases 

 the former preceded the latter. " The difference between the 

 clan of savagery and the gens of barbarism is important and 

 fundamental. The clan is a group of people reckoning kinship 

 in the female line, while the gens is a group of people reckoning 

 kinship in the male line. In barbarism patriarchies are found as 

 concomitant with nomadic tribes, but in savagery the patriarchy 

 does not exist. Hence the first great revolution in tribal society 

 is the transition from the clan to the gens, the consolidation of 



1 The Import of the Totem. Amer. Ass. Detroit, 1897. 



2 M. Chaffanjon, Tour du Monde, 1888, LVI. p. 348. 



3 Ethnology, pp. 9, n. 



