ally,’ plant or animal, by the deliberate joint action of an early group, at a given moment, involving staunch adherence to the original resolution, rather strains belief; and a suggestion perhaps more plausible will be offered later. THE WORD ‘TOTEM’ As to the precise original meaning and form of the word usually written ‘totem’--whether it should be ‘totam,’ or ‘toodaim,’ or ‘dodaim,’ or ‘ododam,’ or ‘ote,’ philologists may dispute.[9] They may question whether the word means ‘mark,’ or ‘family,’ or ‘tribe,’ or clay for painting the family mark.[10] When we here use the word ‘totem’ we mean, at all events, the object which gives its name to a group of savage kindred, who may not marry within this hereditary name. In place of ‘totem’ we might use the equivalent murdu of the Dieri, or gaura of the Kunundaburi.[11] THE TOTEM ‘CULT’ The ‘cult,’ if it deserves to be called a ‘cult,’ of the totem, among savages, is not confined to abstention from marriage within the name. Each kin usually abstains from killing, eating, or in any way using its totem (except in occasional ceremonies, religious or magical), is apt to claim i descent from or kindred with it, or alternations of metamorphosis into or out of it, and sometimes uses its effigy on memorial pillars, on posts carved with a kind of genealogical tree, or tattoos or paints or scarifies it on the skin--in different cases and places. To what extent the blood-feud is taken up by all members of the slain man’s totem, I am not fully aware: it varies in different regions. The eating or slaying of the totem, by a person of the totem name, is in places believed to be punished by disease or death, a point which the late Mr. J. J. Atkinson observed among the natives of New Caledonia (MS. _penes me_). Mr. Atkinson happened to be conversing with some natives on questions of anthropology, when his servant brought in a lizard which he had killed. On this one of the natives exhibited great distress, saying, ‘Why have you killed my father? we were talking of my father, and he came to us’ The son (his name was Jericha) then wrapped the dead lizard up in leaves, and reverently laid the body in the bush. This was not a case like that of the Zulu _Idhlozi_, the serpents that haunt houses, and are believed to be the vehicles of the souls of dead kinsfolk. The other natives present had for their ‘father,’ one, a mouse, the other a pigeon, and so on. If any one ate his animal ‘father,’ sores broke out on him, and Mr. Atkinson was shown a woman thus afflicted, for having eaten her ‘father.’ But I do not find, in his papers, that a man with a mouse for father might not marry a woman of the mouse set, nor have I elsewhere been able to ascertain what is New-Caledonian practice on this point.[12] When Mr. Atkinson made these observations (1874), he had only heard of totems in the novels of Cooper and other romancers. ‘TOTEM GODS’