Mr. Frazer then argues, ‘the explanation which holds good of the one’ (say ‘the sex totem,’ or ‘personal totem’), ‘ought equally to hold good of the other’ (the group totem). ‘Therefore, the reason why a tribe’ (I venture to prefer ‘group,’ or ‘kin,’ as there are many totems in each ‘tribe’) ‘revere a particular species of animals or plants ... and call themselves after it, would seem to be a belief that the life of each individual of the tribe is bound up with some one plant or animal of the species, and that his or her death would be the consequence of killing that particular animal or destroying that particular plant.’ Mr. Frazer thinks that ‘this explanation squares well’ with Sir George Grey’s description of a _Kobong_ or totem in Western Australia. There, a native gives his totem ‘a fair show’ before killing it, always affording it a chance of escape, and never killing it in its sleep. He only does not shoot his kindred animal _sitting_, and his plant he only spares ‘in certain circumstances, and at a particular period of the year.’ Mr. Frazer writes that as the man does not know which individual of the species of plant or animal ‘is specially dear to him, he is obliged to spare them all, for fear of injuring the dear one.’ But the man, it seems from Grey’s account, does not ‘spare’ any of them; he kills or plucks them, ‘reluctantly,’ and in a sportsmanlike manner, ‘never without affording them a chance of escape.’ In a case of Sir George Grey’s, the killing of a crow hastened the death of a man of the Crow totem, who had been ailing for some days. But the Australians do not think that to kill a man’s totem is to kill the man. Somebody’s totem is killed whenever any animal is slain. Mr. Frazer now finds that the Battas, for example, ‘do not in set terms affirm their external soul to be in their totems,’ and I am not aware that any totemists do make this assertion. They freely offer all other sorts of mythical explanations as to what their totems originally were, as to the origin of their connection with their totems, but never say that their totems are their ‘soul-boxes.’ Mr. Frazer has an answer to this objection. ‘How close must be the concealment, how impenetrable the reserve in which he’ (the savage) ‘hides the inner keep and citadel of his being.’ The Giant, in the _Märchen_, tries to keep the secret of his ‘soul-box,’ much more then does ‘the timid and furtive savage.’ ‘No inducement that can be offered is likely to tempt him to imperil his soul by revealing its hiding-place to a stranger. It is, therefore, no matter for surprise that the central mystery of the savaged life should so long have remained a secret, and that we should be left to piece it together from scattered hints and fragments, and from the recollections of it which linger in fairy tales.’