The hypotheses of Mr. J. G. Frazer are purely provisional. He starts from the idea, so common in _Märchen_, of the person whose ‘soul,’ ‘life,’ or ‘strength’ is secretly hidden in an animal, plant, or other object. The owner of the soul wraps the ‘soul-box’ up in a mystery, it is the central secret of his existence, for he may be slain by any one who can discover and destroy his ‘soul-box.’ Next Mr. Frazer offers many cases of this actual belief and practice among savage and barbarous peoples; and, as a freak or survival, the idea is found even among the civilised. We meet the superstition in the Melanesian group of islands (where Totemism is all but extinct), and perhaps among the Zulus, with their serpent Idhlozi, whose life is associated with their own. Mr. Atkinson’s New-Caledonians, however, did not think that death inflicted on their animal ‘fathers’ involved danger to themselves, though it distressed them, as an outrage to sentiment. Then we have the ‘bush-souls’ (one soul out of four in the possession of each individual), among the natives of Calabar. These souls, Miss Kingsley wrote, are never in plants, but always in _wild_ beasts, and are recognisable only by second-sighted men. The ‘bush-soul’ of a man is often that of his sons: the daughters often inherit the mother’s ‘bush-soul:’ or children of both sexes may take the bush-soul of either father or mother. The natives will not injure their bush-soul beasts. Nothing is known as to prohibition of marriage between persons of the same bush-soul. Here we have really something akin to the totem, the bush-souls being hereditary, at least for one generation. But this is among a house-dwelling, agricultural people, far above the state of real savagery: not among a ‘primitive’ people. The Zapotecs of Central America, again, choose, by a method of divination, ‘a _tona_ or second self,’ an animal, for each child, at its birth. It is, by the nature of the case, not hereditable. The _nagual_, usually a beast, of each Indian of Guatemala is well known; and is discovered, on the monition of a dream, by each individual. Therefore it cannot be hereditable. The sexes, in Australia, have each a friendly and protecting species of animal; say a Bat for all men, a Nightjar for all women: indeed, in Australia, all the elements of nature have their place in the cosmic tribe. To injure the animal of either sex, is to injure one of the sex. There is no secret about the matter.