whereupon the irate tortoise called out: "What business is it of yours?" and, of course, thereby let go the stick and, falling down, split in two. Therefore

"Speak wise words not out of season ;

You see how, by talking overmuch,

The tortoise fell,"

In Æsop the tortoise asks an eagle to teach him to fly; in Chinese folk-lore he is carried by geese.

Jacob Grimm's researches concerning the famous mediæval fable of "Reynard the Fox" revealed the ancient and scattered materials out of which that wonderful satire was woven, and there is no feature of the story which reappears more often in Eastern and Western folk-lore than that cunning of the animal which has been for the lampooner and the satirist the type of self-seeking monk and ecclesiastic. When Chanticleer proudly takes an airing with his family, he meets master Reynard, who tells him he has become a "religious," and shows him his beads, and his missal, and his hair shirt, adding, in a voice "that was childlike and bland," that he had vowed never to eat flesh. Then he went off singing his Credo, and slunk behind a hawthorn. Chanticleer, thus thrown off his guard, continues his airing, and the astute hypocrite, darting from his ambush, seizes the plump hen Coppel. So in Indian folk-tale a wolf living near the Ganges is cut off from food by the surrounding water. He decides to keep holy day, and the god Sakka, knowing his lupine weakness, resolves to have some fun with him, and turns

H

himself into a wild goat. "Aha!" says the wolf, "I'll keep the fast another day," and springing up he tried to seize the goat, who skipped about so that he could not be taken. So Lupus gives it up, and says as his solatium: "After all, I've not broken my VOW."

The Chinese have a story of a tiger who desired to eat a fox, but the latter claimed exemption as being superior to the other animals, adding that if the tiger doubted his word he could easily judge for himself. So the two set forth, and, of course, every animal fled at sight of the tiger, who, too stupid to see how he had been gulled, conceived high respect for the fox, and spared his life.

Sometimes the tables are turned. Chanticleer gets his head out of Reynard's mouth by making him answer the farmer, and in the valuable collection of Hottentot tales which the late Dr. Bleek, with some warrant, called Reynard in South Africa, the cock makes the jackal say his prayers, and flies off while the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts his eyes.

But further quotations must be resisted; enough if it is made clearer that the beast-fable is the lineal descendant of barbaric conceptions of a life shared in common by man and brute, and another link thus added to the lengthening chain of the continuity of human history.

S VI.

TOTEMISM: BELIEF IN DESCENT FROM ANIMAL OR PLANT.

In addition to the beliefs in the transformation of men into animals and in the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, we find among barbarous peoples a belief which is probably the parent of one and certainly nearly related to both, namely, in descent from the animal or plant, more often the former, whose name they bear. Its connection with transmigration is seen in the belief of the Moquis of Arizona, that after death they live in the form of their totemic animal, those of the deer family becoming deer, and so on through the several gentes. The belief survives in its most primitive and vivid forms among two races, the aborigines of Australia and the North American Indians. The word "totemism," given to it both in its religious and social aspects, is derived from the Algonquin "dodaim " or "dodhaim," meaning "clanmark." Among the Australians the word "kobong," meaning "friend" or "protector," is the generic term for the animal or plant by which they are known. It is somewhat akin in significance to the Indian words "manitou,” “ oki," etc., comprehending "the manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no sense of personal unity," which are commonly translated by the misleading word "medicine;" hence "medicine-men."

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The family name, or second name borne by all the tribes in lineal descent, and which corresponds to our surname, i.e. super nomen, or "over-name," is derived from names of beasts, birds, plants, etc., around which traditions of their transformation into men linger. Sir George Grey1 says that there is a mysterious connection between a native and his kobong. It is his protecting angel, like the "daimôn' of Socrates, like the "genius" of the early Italian. "If it is an animal, he will not kill one of the species to which it belongs, should he find it asleep, and he always kills it reluctantly and never without affording it a chance of escape. The family belief is that some one individual of the species is their dearest friend, to kill whom would be a great crime," as, in Hindu belief, when a Rajah was said to have entered at death into the body of a fish, a "close time" was at once decreed. Among the Indian tribes we find well-nigh the whole fauna and flora represented, their totems being the Bear, Turtle, Deer, Snake, Eagle, Pike, Corn, Tobacco, etc. Like the Australians, these tribes regarded themselves as being of the breed of their particular animal-totem, and avoided hunting, slaying, and eating (of which more presently) the creature under whose form the ancestor was thought to be manifest. The Chippeways carried their respect even farther. Deriving their origin from the dog, they at one time refrained from employing their supposed canine ancestors in dragging their sledges. The Bechuana and other

1 Travels in N.W. and W. Australia, ii. 229.

avoid eating their tribeThe same prohibitions Northern Asia, and the

people of South Africa will animal or wearing its skin. are found among tribes in Vogulitzi of Siberia, when they have killed a bear, address it formally, maintaining "that the blame is to be laid on the arrows and iron, which were made and forged by the Russians!" Among the Delawares the Tortoise gens claimed supremacy over the others, because their ancestor, who had become a fabled monster in their mythology, bore their world on his back. The California Indians are in interesting agreement with Lord Monboddo when, in claiming descent from the prairie wolf, they account for the loss of their tails by the habit of sitting, which, in course of time, wore them down to the stump! The Kickapoos say their ancestors had tails, and that when they lost them the "impudent fox sent every morning to ask how their tails were, and the bear shook his fat sides at the joke." The Patagonians are said to have a number of animal deities, creators of the several tribes, some being of the caste of the guanaco and others of the ostrich. In short, the group of beliefs and practices found among races in the lower stages of culture point to a widespread common attitude towards the mystery of life around them. In speaking of totemism among the Red races Dr. Brinton thinks that the free use of animate symbols to express abstract ideas, which he finds so frequent, is the source of a confusion which has led to their claiming literal descent from wild beasts. But the barbaric mind