On reflection, we cannot but see the flaw in this reasoning. No savage has revealed _to European inquirers_ that his totem is his ‘soul-box.’ _But every other savage knows his fatal secret_. Every savage, well aware that his own totem is the hiding-place of his soul, knows that the totems of his enemies are the hiding-places of _their_ souls. He wants to kill his enemies, and he has an easy mode of doing so, to shoot down every specimen of their totems. His enemies will then die, when he is lucky enough to destroy their ‘soul-boxes.’ Now I am not aware, in the destructive magic of savages, of a single case in which a totem is slain, or tortured for the purpose of slaying or torturing a man of that totem. All other sorts of sympathetic magic are practised, but where is the evidence for that sort, which ought to be of considerable diffusion?[24] The supposed ‘secret’ of savage life is no secret to other savages. Each tells any inquirer what his ‘clay’ or totem is. He blazons his totem proudly. The nearest approach to invidious action, against a totem, with which I am acquainted, is the killing by the Kurnai women, of the men’s ‘sex totem,’ when the young men are backward wooers. The purpose is to produce a fight between lads and lasses, a rude form of flirtation, after which engagements, or elopements, are apt to follow.[25] Mr. Frazer tentatively suggests another, a rival or a subsidiary solution of the problem, to which reference has already been made. Among the Arunta and other tribes, ‘the totemic system has a much wider scope, its aim being to provide the community with a supply of food and all other necessaries by means of certain magical ceremonies, the performance of which is distributed among the various totem groups.’ That is to say, these totemic magical ceremonies _now_ exist for the purpose of propagating, as part of the food supply, animals or vegetables, which, by the former theory, were the secret receptacles of the lives of the tribesmen. To kill and eat these sacred receptacles would endanger the lives of the tribesmen, but to risk _that_ is quite in accordance with the practical turn of the Arunta mind. Mr. Frazer has, however, suggested a possible method of reconciling his earlier hypothesis--that a totem was a soul-box--with his later theory, that the primal object of totem groups was to breed their totems for food.[26]