Arunta Theory of Evolution 169 
or plant of which he or she was a transformation.” However, it is 
not said that all the totemic clans of the Arunta were thus developed; 
no such tradition, for example, is told to explain the origin of the 
important Witchetty Grub clan. The clans which are positively 
known, or at least said, to have originated out of embryos in the way 
described are the Plum Tree, the Grass Seed, the Large Lizard, the 
Small Lizard, the Alexandra Parakeet, and the Small Rat clans. 
When the Ungambikula had thus fashioned people of these totems, 
they circumcised them all, except the Plum Tree men, by means 
of a fire-stick. -After that, having done the work of creation or 
evolution, the Ungambikula turned themselves into little lizards 
which bear a name meaning “snappers-up of flies’.” 
This Arunta tradition of the origin of man, as Messrs Spencer and 
Gillen, who have recorded it, justly observe, “is of considerable 
interest ; it is in the first place evidently a crude attempt to describe 
the origin of human beings out of non-human creatures who were of 
various forms ; some of them were representatives of animals, others 
of plants, but in all cases they are to be regarded as intermediate 
stages in the transition of an animal or plant ancestor into a human 
individual who bore its name as that of his or her totem”.” Inasense 
these speculations of the Arunta on their own origin may be said to 
combine the theory of creation with the theory of evolution; for 
while they represent men as developed out of much simpler forms of 
life, they at the same time assume that this development was effected 
by the agency of two powerful beings, whom so far we may call 
creators. It is well known that at a far higher stage of culture 
a crude form of the evolutionary hypothesis was propounded by the 
Greek philosopher Empedocles. He imagined that shapeless lumps of 
earth and water, thrown up by the subterranean fires, developed into 
monstrous animals, bulls with the heads of men, men with the heads 
of bulls, and so forth; till at last, these hybrid forms being gradually 
eliminated, the various existing species of animals and men were 
evolved’, The theory of the civilised Greek of Sicily may be set 
beside the similar theory of the savage Arunta of Central Australia. 
Both represent gropings of the human mind in the dark abyss of the 
past ; both were in a measure grotesque anticipations of the modern 
theory of evolution. 
In this essay I have made no attempt to illustrate all the many 
1 Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia (London, 1899), 
pp. 388 sg.; compare id., Northern Tribes of Central Australia (London, 1904), p. 150. 
2 Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 391 sq. 
3 E. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, 1.4 (Leipsic, 1876), pp. 718 sg. ; H. Ritter et - 
L. Preller, Historia Philosophiae Graecae et Romanae ex fontium locis conterta 5, pp. 102 sq. ; 
H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker?, 1. (Berlin, 1906), pp. 190 sqqg. Compare 
Lucretius, De rerum natura, v. 837 qq. 
