Lord Avebury remarks, ‘True, myths do not occur among the lowest races’ (p. 355), whereas, with many others, myths of the origin of Totemism do notably occur, as we have shown, among perhaps all totemistic races. Perhaps we should read, deleting the comma, ‘true myths do not occur among the lowest races,’ when the question as to what a ‘true myth’ is again arises, as in the case of ‘a true Deity.’ Perhaps we must suppose that by ‘a true myth,’ or a ‘true Deity,’ Lord Avebury implies a Deity or a myth in accordance with his own conception of either. LORD AVEBURY ON THE ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM ‘The worship of animals,’ says our author (p. 275), ‘is susceptible of a very simple explanation, and perhaps, as I have ventured to suggest,[2] may have originated from the practice of naming, first individuals, and then their families, after particular animals. A family, for instance, which was called after the bear, would come to look on that animal first with interest, then with respect, and at length with a sort of awe.’ If by ‘individuals,’ male individuals are intended, this theory is open to the objection that Lord Avebury regards descent in the female as earlier than descent in the male line (p. 164), while ‘families’ with enduring relations to their founders, can hardly yet have been consciously envisaged, by his theory, at so very rudimentary a stage. Moreover, we try to show that totem names were, originally, group names, and were not derived from the personal names of individuals, an opinion in which Mr. Haddon concurs. Lord Avebury’s theory is, apparently, that of Mr. Herbert Spencer, _minus_ the supposed worship of the ghost of the male ancestor and founder of the family. COMMUNAL MARRIAGE Lord Avebury assumes, as a working hypothesis, that ‘the communal marriage system ... represents the primitive and earliest social condition of man....’ (p. 102). The objections to this hypothesis we have stated, though, of course, historic certainty cannot be attained. Lord Avebury, assuming ‘communal marriage’ as the Primitive stage, holds that it ‘was gradually superseded by individual marriage founded on capture, and that this led firstly to exogamy, and then to female infanticide; thus reversing Mr. McLennan’s order of sequence’ (p. 108). ‘Originally no man could appropriate a woman of his own _tribe_ exclusively to himself ... without infringing _tribal_ rights, but, on the other hand, if a man captured a woman belonging to another _tribe_, he thereby acquired an individual and peculiar right to her, and she became his exclusively, no one else having any claim or property in her’ (p. 110). (I here italicise ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal.’ Lord Avebury intends, I think, a woman of the same ‘fire-circle’ (p. 188), not a woman of the _tribe_ understood as a large and inevitably not primitive local aggregate of friendly groups of different totems, such as the Arunta, Narrinyeri, Pawnees, and so forth.)