62 • ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



The American student may be said to possess a certain advantage 

 over others in his study of the subject. Nowhere in the world has 

 primitive man received such close and systematic study by trained 

 observers as in this country, and nowhere can we find a wider or mere 

 varied range of culture than among the aborigines of this continent. 

 Every condition of tribal society appears to exist here. There are 

 tribes in the Matriarchal state, tribes under Patriarchal rule, and tribes 

 in all stages of transition between the one and the other. He has, 

 therefore, an ideal field for the study of primitive institutions and 

 concepts and should, with due care, be able to arrive at the heart of 

 things. 



I will, therefore, begin this consideration of the subject by a 

 brief statement of what is regarded by leading American students as 

 the doctrine of totemism. And as the late Director of the Bureau of 

 American Ethnology, so recently as July last set forth briefly in an 

 article in Man, what may be considered the prevailing view of the 

 doctrine in this country, I cannot do bettor than cite his statement 

 of the case in his own words. He writes : " A group of Amerind 

 tribes occupying a limited part of the Dominion of Canada and the 

 United States are known as Algonquins; they belong to a distinct 

 linguistic stock in which many languages are spoken. Among these 

 tribes the word ' totem ' or its variant is used, and these are the 

 languages from which the word comes. The word is derived from 

 a root which signifies clay. Among the Algonquian tribes clay was 

 used to paint the face and body with the heraldic devices [that is 

 the totem symbols] of a group of persons .... The group is composed 

 of suoh persons as reckon consanguineal kinship only through the 

 mother; thus, the mother and her brothers and sisters and their 

 mother with her brothers and sisters, belong to the group, and the 

 kinship may be reckoned in the same manner through an indefinite num- 

 ber of generations. This group we call a clan, but the Algonquians 

 call it a totem, thus clan and totem are synonymous .... There are 

 other tribes in which the clan group is replaced by what we call the 

 gentile group. This group is like that discovered among the Latin 

 tribes, and embraces those persons who reckon kinship throujgh the 

 father with his brothers and s'-sters, including their father and his 

 brothers and sisters. Thus the mother's group and the grandmother's 

 group are excluded. . . . When the second group is found we call it 

 a gens .... In America we call the name of the elan and also the name 

 of the gens its totem, and totemism is considered a method of naming. 

 Among some tribes the child on coming to puberty takes a new name, 

 and this name is called its totem. ... In every tribe among the 

 Amerinds societies are organized, which we formerly called ^medi- 



