52 Annual Ad'he^i^. [Frb. 



of each totem solemnly mimic the animals and plants after which 

 they are called, and eat a small portion of them with the object 

 of ensuring a plentiful supply of the animals and plants of that species. 

 Thus the men of tlie totem called after the Witchefcty grub, a succulent 

 caterpillar of some kind which is esteemed a great luxurj^^, paint their 

 bodies in imitation of the giub, crawl through a structure of boughs 

 supposed to represent its chrysalis, chant a song inviting the insect to go 

 and lay eggs, and butt each other in the stomach with the remark "You 

 have eaten much food." The Emu men dress themselves up to resemble 

 Emus and imitate the movements and aitnless gazing about of the 

 birds ; the Kangaroo men and the men of the Hakea Flower totem go 

 through similar mummeries. 



Now in the first place the doubt occurs to one whether small ^ and 

 moribund tribes, such as the Australians, can fairly be taken to be 

 typical of primitive man. Tf they could, then man would be primitive 

 still, and we should none of us have gob to the point of vexing our souls 

 about the origin of anything. The one distinctive feature of the 

 Australian natives is their incapacity for any sort of progressive evolu- 

 tion. Surely an atrophied or it may be degenerate man of that type is 

 not the sort of ancestor we want to discover; for it is difficult to see 

 what we can learn from him. In Europe on the other hand primitive 

 man, so far as we can judge from the traces he has left behind seems to 

 have been an animal of an entirely different tyye. He had indeed his 

 weaknesses — does not his vates sacer, Mr. Andrew Lang, impute to him 

 a diet of oysters and foes — but he fought a good fight with his environ- 

 ment and as events show he came out a winner. It seems then that 

 the quest of primitive man ready made and only waiting to be observed 

 and analysed may be nothing better than a tempting short cut, leading 

 to delusion, and that what we must look to is not so much primitive man 

 but primitive usage regarded in its bearing on evolution. 



It is from this point of view that I wish to put in a plea for tlie 

 consideration of the Indian data. Primitive usages may, I would 

 suggest, be divided, as Mr. Bagehot divided political institutions, into 

 the effective and the ineffective, in other words, into those which affect 

 evolution and those which do not. In the case of totemism you can 

 distinguish these two pretty clearly. The magical ritual of the Arunta 

 tribe obviously belongs to the ineffective class. No one outside the 

 Arunta— and even among them one would think there must be augurs — 



1 Spencer and Gillon, p. 9. See also p. 114, where it is stated that the word 

 "corroboree" for a tribal dance or orgie is borrowed from the whites, Can any 

 one imanjine a compact tribe, like the Santals, borrowing a foreign term for a tribal 

 custom ? 



