20 
MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 19. 
of the crests, with the one exception already noted (the mountain- 
goat occurs both as a ^tspo mU dwt'dd and qana'da crest) is restricted 
to a single phratry; the grizzly bear of the Wolf phratry is, 
of course, not the same being as the water grizzly of the fetspo’*- 
dwt'd 9. 
There is no doubt that at least one reason for the appearance 
of the same crest in more than one clan is the fact that clans 
often originated by the splitting of earlier more inclusive units, so 
that they share the same tradition up to a certain point. More- 
over, the fact that any particular clan possesses only one form 
of a given crest points to the secondary origin of the more 
special forms of the typical crests; thus, the beaver, “standing 
beaver,” and “beaver eating wood” of various Eagle clans 
doubtless represent special developments of a common beaver- 
crest tradition. 
On the other hand, if any weight is to be attached to the 
non-occurrence of characteristic phratric crests in certain clans, 
there would seem to be very good reason to believe that at 
least some of these originally stood outside the j phratry and 
were only later, perhaps owing to the stress of some systematizing 
tendency, included in one of the four main phratries now recog- 
nized. In this way would be explained, for instance, why two 
of the three Nass River %cspo- u dwi'd 9 clans recorded have the 
moon as their main crest (without at the same time owning the 
killer- whale), while the other has the killer- whale as its main crest 
(without at the same time owning the moon) . Here two originally 
distinct clans, or groups of clans, one characterized by the 
killer-whale crest, the other by the moon crest, seem to have 
become consolidated into a £ cspo' u dwrd 9 phratry. Equally 
instructive examples occur among the Wolf and Eagle families. 
That, e.g., two of the nine Eagle clans recorded, the laxisdme'l'x 
or Beaver clan of the kct'anwt'Pkc and the fcUqane m,€ qs clan 
of the same tribe, do not own the eagle, their phratric crest, 
is best explained by assuming that they originally had nothing 
to do with the true Eagle clan or phratry, but were only second- 
arily amalgamated with it. The former of these two exceptional 
families is, significantly enough, characterized by a name that 
directly refers to one of its crests, the beaver; the very form 
