402 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 



giving reasons why, after mature reflection, he had abandoned 

 other theories as unsatisfactory, he says : — 



" After long reflection it occurred to me that the simple idea, the primitive 

 superstition at the root of totemism, may perhaps be found in the mode by 

 which the Central Australian aborigines still determine the totems of every 

 man, woman and child of the tribe. That mode rests on a primitive theory 

 of conception. Ignorant of the true causes of childbirth, they imagine that 

 a child only enters into a woman at the moment when she first feels it stirring 

 in her womb, and accordingly they have to explain to themselves why it 

 should enter her body at that particular moment. Necessarily it has come 

 from outside, and therefore from something which the woman herself may 

 have seen or felt immediately before she knew herself to be with child. The 

 theory of the Central Australians is that a spirit child has made its way into 

 her from the nearest of those trees, rocks, water-pools, or other natural 

 features at which the spirits of the dead are waiting to be born again ; and 

 since only the spirits of people of one particular totem are believed to con- 

 gregate at any one spot, and the natives well know what totemic spirits 

 haunt each hallowed plot of ground, a woman has no difficulty in determining 

 the totem of her unborn child. If the child enters her, that is, if she felt her 

 womb quickened, near a tree haunted by spirits of Kangaroo people, then 

 her child will be of the kangaroo totem ; if she felt the first premonitions 

 of maternity near a rock tenanted by spirits of Emu people, then her child 

 will be of the emu totem ; and so on throughout the whole length of the 

 totemic gamut. This is not a matter of speculation. It is the belief held 

 universally by all the tribes of Central and Northern Australia, so far as 

 these beliefs are known to us." 



This theory, however, does not explain " the relation in 

 which groups of people stand to species of things," because that 

 which the woman imagined to enter her body at conception was 

 not an animal, plant, or what not, but only " the spirit of a human 

 child which has an animal, a plant, a stone, or what not for its 

 totem. Had the woman supposed that what passed into her at 

 the critical moment was an animal, a plant, a stone, or what not, 

 and that when her child was born it would be that animal, plant, 

 or stone in human form, then we should have a complete explana- 

 tion of totemism." The essence of totemism. Dr. Frazer says, 

 consists in the identification of a man with a thing — whether an 

 animal, a plant, or what not ; that if a man believed himself to be 

 the very thing — whether animal, plant, or anything else — which 

 had entered his mother's womb at conception and had issued from 

 it at childbirth, the identification would be complete. " Accord- 

 ingly I conjectured," he says, " that the Central Australian beliefs 

 as to conception are but one remove from absolute primitive 

 totemism, which, on my theory, ought to consist in nothing more 

 or less than in a belief that women are impregnated without the 

 help of men by something which enters their womb at the moment 

 when they first feel it quickened, for such a belief would perfectly 

 explain the essence of totemism — that is, the identification of 

 groups of people with groups of things." 



Dr. Frazer then says : — 



" We conclude, then, that the ultimate source of totemism is a savage 

 ignorance of the physical process by which men and animals reproduce their 

 kinds ; in particular it is an ignorance of the part played by the male in 



