6 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
the subject; for there is little room for doubt that our clan totems are 
a development of the personal or individual totem or tutelar spirit, 
as this is in turn a development of an earlier fetishism. Whether the 
totemism of the southern and eastern tribes of this continent, or that 
of other regions, has passed through these two stages, I will not take 
upon myself to say, though as far as a large part of this continent is 
concerned, T think it highly probable;? but that totemism may at any 
rate in some cases thus originate, the evidence I have gathered from my 
studies of the different Salish tribes makes abundantly clear. 
According to Major Powell, “it was customary for each clan to 
adopt a tutelar god,” which, “always gave the name to the clan.” One 
hesitates to put oneself in conflict with such an authority on matters 
Indian as Major Powell unquestionably is; but here no alternative is 
left one. Such a definition of totemism and such an origin as is here 
ascribed to it is entirely at variance with the facts of the case as they 
are found to obtain in this part of the continent. Indeed, I am con- 
strained to gravely question whether any clan anywhere ever deliberately 
“adopts” or “selects” a tutelar deity by whose name they afterwards 
call themselves. The origin of totems, as far as we have been able to 
trace them, never, I think, gives us the view of a clan sitting down to 
consider and determine what deity they shall “adopt” by whose name 
they shall call themselves. It may be that Major Powell has here used 
these two words “adopt” and “select” in some sense other than the 
ordinary, which is the more unfortunate as the definition appears in a 
popular work, and cannot fail to mislead those who seek therein for 
information on this head. Moreover this definition seems to me to 
conflict with his statements on the same head in his article on “Sociology, 
or the Science of Institutions,” where it is distinetly stated that: “ The 
totem of the clan is considered to be the progenitor or prototype of 
the clan. The people of the Wolf clan claim to have descended from 
the wolf, the people of the Eagle clan, from the eagle,” ete. It is not 
clear how this can be if the clan “adopt” and “select” its totem, and 
thereafter call themselves by its name. 
1 have dwelt upon this point rather because of the concluding and 
very dogmatic (even for such a master as Major Powell) sentence of the 
definition which rigidly narrows the question to very local limits and 
permits the inquirer to gather no glimpse of the manifold phases under 
which totemism manifests itself in various parts even of this continent. 

1Since the expression of this opinion, I find that it receives direct con- 
firmation in the interesting and suggestive paper of Mr. J. Owen Dorsey on 
the Sioux Cults, published in the 11th Annual Report of the American Bureau 
of Ethnology. 
