612 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 
Totem, and commonly believe themselves to be actually descended 
from it. 6. Believing himself to be descended from, and there- 
fore akin to, his Totem, the savage will not, asa rule, kill nor 
eat it.” 
Looking for Totems answering to this description of them in 
Melanesia, I find them in a paper by Mr. Danks, read before the 
British Association at Bath in 1888. He describes Totems as he 
finds them in New Britain. Having no knowledge, however, of 
these things myself, I make no comment on tbem further than to 
observe that I believe that it must be right to interpret them 
according to the analogy which they bear to what has been 
observed in other parts of Melanesia. 
Passing on to what I have myself observed and enquired into, 
1 will arrange beliefs and customs in Melanesia which seem to 
belong to Totemism according to five examples :—l. In the 
island of Aurora, in the New Hebrides, mothers sometimes have 
a fancy, before the birth of a child, that the infant is connected 
in its origin with a cocoanut or breadfruit, or some such object, 
a connection which the natives express by saying that the 
children are a kind of echo of such things. The child, therefore, 
is taught not to eat that in which it has had its origin, and is 
told, what the mothers entirely believe, that to eat it will bring 
disease. In the Banks’ Islands a man will get a notion that he 
is connected in origin with a cuttle-fish, for example, or a crab, 
which he sees when he dives into a pool among the coral rocks. 
He will say that the creature is his “beginning.” 2. In the 
Banks’ Islands, again, some men had a persuasion that there was 
something, generally something animate, which was peculiarly 
and intimately connected with himself, something either shown 
him by another in that character, or discovered under some 
circumstances by himself. Such a thing a man believed to be a 
kind of reflection of his own personality ; he and it would live, 
flourish, suffer and die together. 3. In the island of Ulawa, in 
the Solomon group, it was observed that the people of a part of 
it would not eat bananas, and had ceased to plant them. The 
reason they gave for this was that to eat bananas would be 
displeasing to the objects of their worship. In the neighbouring 
part of Malanta it was found to be not unusual for a great man, 
before his death, to announce that after death he should be in or 
associated with some such thing as the banana, for example, 
which the people afterwards would not eat, because to eat it 
would be like eating him. 4. In the before-mentioned island of 
Aurora there are families within the two great exogamous 
divisions of the people. One of these is named from the octopus. 
If anyone of another family wished to get octopus for food he 
would ask one of this family to go to the part of the beach to 
which the family was said to have originally belonged, and 
standing there, to cry out, “So-and-so wants octopus.” Then 
