This example is here cited because, as far as I am aware, no other anthropologist has observed this amount of Totemism in New Caledonia. Students are divided into those who have a bias in favour of finding totemism everywhere; and those who aver, with unconcealed delight, that in this or the other place there are no totems. Such negative statements must always be received with caution. An European may live long among savages before he really knows them; and, without possessing totemism in full measure, many races retain obvious fragments of the institution. Mr. Tylor has censured the use of the terms ‘totems’ and ‘totem clans’ with respect to the Fijians and Samoans, where certain animals, not to be eaten, are believed to be vehicles or shrines of certain gods. It is a very probable conjecture (so probable, I think, as almost to amount to a certainty), that the creatures which are now the shrines of Fijian or Samoan gods of the family, or of higher gods, were once totems in an earlier stage of Samoan and Fijian society and belief. As I have said elsewhere, ‘in totemistic countries the totem is respected himself; in Samoa the animal is worshipful because a god abides within him. This appears to be a theory by which the reflective Samoans have explained to themselves what was once pure Totemism.’[13] But I must share in Mr. Tylor’s protest against using the name of ‘totem’ for a plant or animal which is regarded as the shrine of a god. Such thorough totemists as some of the North American Indians, or the Australians, do not explain their totems as the shrines of gods, for they have no such gods to serve as explanations. That myth appears to be the Samoan or Fijian way of accounting for the existence of worshipful and friendly plants and animals.