162. Primitive Theories of the Origin of Man. 
men were about to catch fish near an Assiga town in Southern 
Nigeria, the natives of the town objected, saying, “Our souls live in 
those fish, and if you kill them we shall die.” On another occasion, 
in the same region, an Englishman shot a hippopotamus near a native 
village. The same night a woman died in the village, and her friends 
demanded and obtained from the marksman five pounds as compensa- 
tion for the murder of the woman, whose soul or second self had been 
in that hippopotamus”. Similarly at Ndolo, in the Congo region, we 
hear of a chief whose life was bound up with a hippopotamus, but he 
prudently suffered no one to fire at the animal?. 
Amongst people who thus fail to perceive any sharp line of 
distinction between beasts and men it is not surprising to meet with 
the belief that human beings are directly descended from animals. 
Such a belief is often found among totemic tribes who imagine that 
their ancestors sprang from their totemic animals or plants ; but it is 
by no means confined to them. Thus, to take instances, some of the 
Californian Indians, in whose mythology the coyote or prairie-wolf is 
a leading personage, think that they are descended from coyotes. At 
first they walked on all fours; then they began to have some 
members of the human body, one finger, one toe, one eye, one ear, 
and so on; then they got two fingers, two toes, two eyes, two ears, 
and so forth; till at last, progressing from period to period, 
they became perfect human beings. The loss of their tails, 
which they still deplore, was produced by the habit of sitting upright’ 
Similarly Darwin thought that “the tail has disappeared in man and 
the anthropomorphous apes, owing to the terminal portion having 
been injured by friction during a long lapse of time; the basal and 
embedded portion having been reduced and modified, so as to 
become suitable to the erect or semi-erect position®.” The Turtle 
clan of the Iroquois think that they are descended from real 
mud turtles which used to live in a pool. One hot summer the 
pool dried up, and the mud turtles set out to find another. A very 
fat turtle, waddling after the rest in the heat, was much incommoded 
by the weight of his shell, till by a great effort he heaved it off 
altogether. After that he gradually developed into a man and 
became the progenitor of the Turtle clan®. The Crawfish band of the 
1 Charles Partridge, Cross River Natives (London, 1905), pp. 225 sq. 
2 C. H. Robinson, Hausaland (London, 1896), pp. 36 sq. 
3 Notes Analytiques sur les Collections Ethnographiques du Musée du Congo, 1. 
(Brussels, 1902—06), p. 150. 
4H. R. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, 1v. (Philadelphia, 1856), 
pp. 224 sq.; compare id. v. p. 217. The descent of some, not all, Indians from coyotes 
is mentioned also by Friar Boscana, in [A. Robinson’s] Life in California (New York, 
1846), p. 299. 
5 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Second Edition (London, 1879), p. 60. 
6 EB, A. Smith, “Myths of the Iroquois,” Second Annual Report of the Bureau of 
Ethnology (Washington, 1883), p. 77. 
