PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. Bs 
respectively ; ceremonies for the making of rain are performed 
by men of the water totem, and so on. The discovery of these 
ceremonies appears to shed a new and unexpected light on the 
meaning of totemism, at least among the Central Australian 
tribes, by suggesting that its primary purpose is the thoroughly 
practical one of satisfying the material wants of the savage, 
this purpose being carried out by distributing the various func- 
tions to be discharged among different groups, who thereby 
become totem clans. On this hypothesis totemism is of high 
interest to the economist, since it furnishes, perhaps, the oldest 
example of a systematic division of labour among the members 
of a community. 
In the second place, it is of great interest to observe that 
these Intichiuma ceremonies are purely magical and not at all 
religious. They contain no appeal by means of prayer and 
sacrifice to a deity; they are supposed to produce the desired 
effect directly and immediately without the intervention or aid 
of any higher spiritual power. Taken together with the appa- 
rent absence of all religious rites among the Central Australians, 
who rank with the Jowest races in the scale of humanity, they 
tend to show that in the evolution of thought magic has pre- 
ceded religion. This js a conclusion to which other evidence 
and other considerations also point, and I venture to think that 
it is likely to gain ground among students of mankind the more 
we know of the actual workize of the savage mind. 
In the third place, it is worthy of note that the Intichiuma 
ceremonies are, at least in many cases, annual, and are gener- 
ally held at the approach of what may be called the Australian 
spring, at the time, that is, when animal and vegetable life is 
about to burst into fresh activity through the fall of the first 
heavy rains after the long season of drought. Thus the Inti- 
chiuma ceremonies present a close and striking analogy to the 
spring ceremonies of European peasants, as these latter cere- 
monies have been interpreted by the genius and insight of the 
German anthropologist, W. Mannhardt. According to him the 
custoims of which the May pole, the May Queen, and the Jack- 
in-the-Green are perhaps the most familiar examples to English- 
speaking people, were originally charms intended to secure the 
revival of vegetation in spring; and certain other popular 
European customs, such as drenching mummers with water, 
kindling bonfires and leaping over them, and running with 
lighted torches about the fields, which are specially observed 
in spring and at midsummer, were similarly explained by Mann- 
hardt as magical ceremonies intended to ensure that supply of 
rain, of sunshine, and of heat, without which neither plants nor 
men could exist. His interpretation of these European cere- 
monies was necessarily to some extent a matter of inference 
rather than of direct testimony, for few of the people who now 
