196 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



animals for sustenance or of burden-bearing animals by whose 

 aid fresh, game areas may be readily occupied. The persistent 

 nomads e. g., the Arabs have possessed both kinds of animals. 

 The Indians had neither. The large majority of the historic In- 

 dians never saw a horse until centuries after the Columbian dis- 

 covery. The Dakota, Comanche, and some other tribes became 

 nomads adventitiously, and only after the introduction of the 

 horse by Europeans. The means of subsistence of these tribes in 

 a nomadic life were afterward increased by their obtaining fire- 

 arms. 



The pastoral stage also depended upon the possession of some 

 of the animals mentioned. It expedited the transition of the Is- 

 raelites from savagery to barbarism, but it was not experienced by 

 the Indians. Therefore, supposing that the two peoples were at 

 one time equally advanced in culture, it might well have required 

 three thousand years longer for the Indians to reach the stage in 

 which they were discovered than for the Israelites to attain to the 

 culture shown in the days of the Judges. 



At the time taken for proper comparison between the two 

 peoples, which has before been designated, both were living under 

 the clan or totemic system, which was formerly called the gentile 

 system. 



A clan is a body of kindred in which kinship is established by 

 laws now long disused, and so strange to our present ideas as to be 

 comprehended with difficulty. Some of the more salient features 

 of the system appear in the division of the people into tribes 

 which are interpermeated by clans, with special rules of govern- 

 ment, adoption, punishment, protection, property, and marriage. 



The totemic stage was first intelligently noticed among the 

 aborigines of America and Australia, and typical representations 

 of it are still found among them. In Australia it is called Jco- 

 bong. An animal or a plant, or sometimes a heavenly body, is 

 connected with all persons of a certain stock, who believe that it 

 is their totem, their protecting daimon. They regard themselves 

 as descendants of the totem, and they bear its name. The line 

 of descent is normally female. "When a clan becomes dominant, 

 its totem daimon prevails together with it, and commands the 

 worship of all the clans or tribes in the group, the daimons of 

 other clans and tribes becoming subordinate. 



The clan system, lately found in actual force in two large geo- 

 graphic divisions of the world, has preserved a clew to the moldered 

 maze of man's early institutions. What is now known of the 

 clans, tribes, and league of the Iroquois explains what was for- 

 merly mystical about the tribes of Israel. 



Each clan or tribe took as a badge or objective totem the 

 representation of the totemic daimon from which it was named. 



