cession from the female to the male line. Lecture nine contains a general summary and a return to the "king of the woods" in an attempt to explain his character in the light of the facts adduced. More important, however, than the explanation of this one phenomenon are the general theories which accompany it, the principal of which are summed up on pages 278 to 280, as follows:

"We have found that at an early stage of society men, ignorant of the secret processes of nature and of the narrow limits within which it is in our power to control and direct them, have commonly arrogated to themselves functions which in the present state of knowledge we should deem superhuman or divine. The illusion has been fostered and maintained by the same causes which begot it, namely, the marvellous order and uniformity with which nature conducts her operations, the wheels of her great machine revolving with a smoothness and precision which enable the patient observer to anticipate in general the season, if not the very hour, when they will bring round the fulfillment of his hopes or the accomplishment of his fears. The regularly recurring events of this great cycle, or rather series of cycles, soon stamp themselves even on the dull mind of the savage. He foresees them, and foreseeing them mistakes the desired recurrence for an effect of his own will, and the dreaded recurrence for an effect of the will of his enemies. Thus the springs which set the vast machine in motion, though they lie beyond our ken, shrouded in a mystery which we can never hope to penetrate, appear to ignorant man to lie within his reach: he fancies he can touch them and so work by magic art all manner of good to himself and evil to his foes. In time the fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to him: he discovers that there are things he cannot do, pleasures which he is unable of himself to procure, pains which even the most potent magician is powerless to avoid. The unattainable good, the inevitable ill, are now ascribed by him to the action of invisible powers, whose favor is joy and life, whose anger is misery and death. Thus magic tends to be replaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the priest. At this stage of thought the ultimate causes of things are conceived to be personal beings many in number and often discordant in character, who partake of the nature and even of the frailty of man, though their might is greater than his, and their life far exceeds the span of his ephemeral existence. Their sharply marked individualities, their clear-cut outlines have not yet begun, under the powerful solvent of philosophy, to melt and coalesce into that single unknown substratum of phenomena, which, according to the qualities with which our imagination invests it, goes by one or other of the high-sounding

names which the wit of man has devised to hide his ignorance. Accordingly, so long as men look on their gods as beings akin to themselves and not raised to an unapproachable height above them, they believe it to be possible for those of their number who surpass their fellows to attain to divine rank after death, or even in life. Incarnate human deities of this latter sort may be said to halt midway between the age of magic and the age of religion. If they bear the names and display the pomp of deities, the powers which they are supposed to wield are commonly those of their predecessor, the magician. Like him, they are expected to guard their people against hostile enchantments, to heal them in sickness, to bless them with offspring, and to provide them with an abundant supply of food by regulating the weather and performing the other ceremonies which are deemed necessary to insure the fertility of the earth and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited with powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in the land, and while the rift between spiritual and temporal spheres has not yet deepened too far, they are supreme in civil as well as religious matters; in a word they are kings as well as gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots deep down in human history, and long ages pass before these are sapped by a profounder view of nature and of man.'

These and similar theories of religious and social evolution are not altogether new. In fact they are treasured by a certain school of ethnologists as assured facts and as the sine qua non of anthropological investigation. At the same time they are open to many very serious objections. Although magic certainly does play a great part in the religion of those people which we are wont to call "primitive," the tribe has yet to be discovered in which religion consists of nothing else, and so long as that is the case Mr Frazer's statement of the evolution of religion from magic must remain the theory of a man or of a school, and subject to the vicissitudes of any other unproved hypothesis, by no means entitled to consideration as an organic part of science. Moreover, it is one thing to suppose that certain men or even bodies of men imagine that they can affect natural phenomena, but quite another to maintain that the mass of primitive men ever believed that they actually created or produced them, and it is just this imagined production on the part of the masses which the theory here advanced makes necessary.

Nor does our author's hypothesis regarding the evolution of kings appear to be founded on a much firmer basis. In Indian society, at all events, a sharp line must be drawn between the shaman or conjurer who acts as an individual, or perhaps as a member of a secret order, and the

priest whose functions are national. The former may be, and sometimes is, a chief, but his supernatural abilities are not at the basis of his secular leadership. On the contrary they are are a mere appanage or "accident" of his position, while either heredity, or wealth, bravery, sagacity, and all those virtues which bring power to individuals in civilized society are the real bases of his authority. The priestly functions, being tribal in character, lend themselves to union with civil chieftainship much more readily, but in few instances can the original functions of the priest-king be shown to have been purely ecclesiastical, and in any case it is by no means certain that the priest has evolved out of the shaman.

The supposed "evolution" of society from a maternal to a paternal stage noticed incidentally has no better foundation than the two theories already considered. The fact is that some tribes are organized on a maternal basis, some on a paternal basis, while a very large number, and of these many which on other grounds would ordinarily be considered the lowest, are properly neither the one nor the other but partake of both. Nor is there the slightest reason, beyond subservience to a widespread and popular theory, for supposing that the last have altered from any other condition.

It is to be feared that there has been a too great tendency among some anthropologists to segregate the phenomena presented by lower races and pick out certain elements as "primitive" for no better reason than because they do not occur or have been largely suppressed in our present so called "higher" culture. We thus assume our own culture as an infallible standard of comparison and everything outside as "primitive" in proportion as it diverges therefrom. It is much the same as if we were to assume that because the brain appears to be the seat of intelligence the growth of an individual had begun with the bones. For such phenomena as magic and belief in zoic or anthropomorphic beings do not show themselves successively, but are altogether contemporaneous, and if the above method of reasoning were followed, it would be possible, by a judicious selection of phenomena, to prove anything. The same may be said of the evolution of the kingship and of society in general.

JOHN R. SWANTON.

The Secret of the Totem. BY ANDREW LANG. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1905. 12°, 225 pp.

In spite of the noted contributions of Mr Lewis H. Morgan and other Americans to the question of the evolution of human society, this subject has always been much more vigorously discussed in England than

on this side of the Atlantic. But while the works of many English students, such as Spencer and Gillen, Howitt, Fison, and Haddon, certainly contain priceless scientific contributions to the study, apparently additional data have not served to set many of the ultimate questions at rest, and in fact we seem to have a different theory for every new investigator. The book before us is that of a special pleader for one such theory, and he proceeds, as might be expected, by first discussing and refuting opposing theories and then stating his own opinions and his reasons for considering them as involving the true explanation.

The opposing theories referred to are epitomized as follows on pages 31 and 32:

"(a) Members of certain recognized human groups already married habitually out of their group into other groups, before the animal names (now totem names) were given to the groups. The names came later and merely marked, at first, and then sanctioned, the limits within which marriage had already been forbidden while the groups were still nameless.

"Or (b) the animal names of the phratries and totem kins existed (perhaps as denoting groups which worked magic for the behoof of each animal) before marriage was forbidden within their limits. Later, for some reason, prohibitions were enacted.

"Or (c) at one time there were no marriage regulations at all, but these arose when, apparently for some religious reason, a hitherto undivided communal horde split into two sections, each of which revered a different namegiving animal as their 'god' (totem), claimed descent from it, and out of respect to their 'god,' did not marry any of those who professed its faith, and were called by its name, but always married persons of another name and 'god.'

"Or (d) men were at first in groups, intermarrying within the group. These groups received names from animals and other objects, because individual men adopted animal ‘familiars,' as Bear, Elk, Duck, Potato, Pine-tree. The sisters of the men next adopted these animal or vegetable 'familiars,' or protective creatures, from their brothers, and bequeathed them, by female descent, to their children. These children became groups bearing such names as Bear, Potato, Duck, and so on. These groups made treaties of marriage with each other, for political reasons of acquiring strength by union. The treaties declared that Duck should never marry Duck, but always Elk, and vice versa. This was exogamy, instituted for political purposes, to use the wordpolitical' proleptically.

"Or (e) men were at first in a promiscuous incestuous horde, but, perceiving the evils of this condition (whatever these evils might be taken to be), they divided it into two halves [sic], of which one must never marry within itself, but always in the other. To these divisions animal names were given;

AM. ANTH., N. S., 7-11

they are the phratries. They threw off colonies, or accepted other groups, which took new animal names, and are now the totem kins.

Finally, in () conjectures (a) and (c) may be combined thus: groups of men, still nameless as groups, had for certain reasons the habit of not marrying within themselves, but, after receiving animal names, they developed an idea that the animal of each group was its kinsman, and that, for a certain superstitious reason, it was even more wrong than it had been before, to marry 'within the blood' of the animal, as, for Emu to marry Emu. Or (f2) the small groups did marry within themselves till, after receiving animal names, they evolved the superstition that such marriage was a sin against the animals, and so become exogamous.'

This last theory (fi and ƒ2) is Mr Lang's; (b) was suggested by Prof. Baldwin Spencer and Mr J. G. Frazer, and is accepted by Mr Howitt; (c) is that of Dr Durkheim; (d) is that of Mr Hill-Tout, while (e) is that formerly held by Mr Howitt.

It would, of course, be entirely impossible to follow Mr Lang in his discussion of the rival hypotheses without reproducing a large part of his work, but since he assumes so largely the character of a critic he will hardly deem it unfair if we treat his own theory in the same critical

manner.

In the first place we may say that we are pleased and refreshed to find an English sociologist cutting free from the erstwhile popular notion of an undifferentiated primitive horde with promiscuous intercourse between the sexes out of which comes a matrimonial cosmos via the tortuous path of group marriage, polyandry, polygamy, etc. In his abandonment of all this and his advocacy of numbers of small local groups as the primitive state of society Mr Lang is much to be commended.

He is not so happy, however, when he attempts to account for exogamy among those groups. In adopting Darwin's suggestion that they have arisen from the custom among male anthropoid apes of fighting for supremacy in each band and killing or driving off the vanquished, he appears to be treading on very thin ice. Certainly we do not know of any human form of society in which a custom at all like this obtains, nor is it easy to see how a jealousy contest could pass over so readily into a voluntary custom. If a tendency to marry out of the group is inherited, why not a tendency to fight all the other males within it before doing so? Why do not the males in the group regard each other as mortal enemies? Far from this being the case, the males in a clan or band such as is supposed to be evolved in this manner, consider each other as "friends" and in time of trouble stand or fall together.