In ‘Notice sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie’ (1900) this ferocious hostility between near neighbouring groups is corroborated. It is certain death for the crew of a canoe to be driven into a harbour, however near their own, which is not their own. This is among the islanders not under the French. Count von Pfeil remarks on the violent hostility between Kanakas and others near adjacent.[44] On this point of unfriendly _sobriquets_ I may quote MM. Gaidoz and Sébillot.[45] ‘In all ages men love to speak ill of their neighbour: to blazon him, in the old phrase of a time when our speech was less prudish, and more gay. Pleasantries are exchanged not only between man and man, but between village and village. Sometimes in one expressive word, the defect, or the quality (usually the defect), the dominant and apparently hereditary trait of the people of a race or a province is stated ... in a kind of verbal caricature.... _Les hommes se sont donc blazonnés de tout le temps_? _De tout le temps!_ MM. Gaidoz and Sébillot were not thinking of the origin of totem names, but their theory applies ‘to all ages,’ even the most primitive. Among French village _sobriquets_ I note, at a hasty glance, Largitzen Cows Houmeau Frogs Angoulême Lizards Artois Dogs Aire Pigeons Avalon Birds and villages named as eaters of: Old Ewes Onions Crows. We shall see that many Sioux groups, many English villages are blazoned, as in Mr. Haddon’s theory, by the names of the things which they eat: or are accused of eating. Thus, among very early men, the names by which the groups knew their neighbours would be names given from without. To call them ‘nicknames,’ is to invite the objection that nicknames are essentially _derisive_, and that groups so low could not yet use the language of derision. I see no reason why early articulate-speaking men (or even men whose language is gesture language) should be so modern as to lack all sense of humour, all delight in derision. But the names need not have been derisive. If these people had the present savage belief in the wakan, or mystic power of animals, the names may even have been laudatory. I ask for no more than names conferred from without, call them nicknames, _sobriquets_, or what you like.