At Loughton, when the Hillborough boys pass through on a holiday excursion, the Loughton boys hang out dead mice, the Hillborough badge, in derision. The boys have even their ‘personal totem,’ and a lad who wishes for a companion in nocturnal adventure will utter the cry of his peculiar beast or bird, and a friend will answer with _his_. If boys remained always boys (that is, savages), and if civilisation were consequently wiped out, myths about these group names of villages would be developed, and Totemism would flourish again. Later I give other instances of village names answering to totem names, and in an Appendix I give analogous cases collected by Miss Burne in Shropshire, and others, we saw, are to be found in the _blason populaire_ of France. It appears to me that totem group names may, originally, have been imposed _from without_, just as the Eskimo are really Inuits; ‘Eskimo,’ ‘Eaters of raw flesh,’ being the derisive name conferred by their Indian neighbours. Of course I do not mean that the group names would always, or perhaps often, have been, in origin, derisive nicknames. Many reasons, as has been said, might prompt the name-giving. But each such group would, I suggest, evolve animal and vegetable nicknames for each neighbouring group. Finally some names would ‘stick,’ would be stereotyped, and each group would come to answer to its nickname, just as ‘Pussy Moncrieff,’ or ‘Bulldog Irving,’ or ‘Piggy Frazer,’ or ‘Cow Maitland,’ does at school. HOW THE NAMES BECAME KNOWN Here the questions arise, how would each group come to know by what name each of its neighbours called it, and how would hostile groups Come to have the same nicknames for each other? Well, they would know the nicknames through taunts exchanged in battle. ‘Run, you deer, run!’ ‘Off with you, you hares!’ ‘Skuttle, you skunks!’ They would readily recognise the appropriateness of the names, if derived from the plants, trees, or animals most abundant in their area, and most important to their food supply: for, at this hypothetical stage, and before myths had crystallised round the names, they would have no scruples about eating their name-giving plants, fruits, fishes, birds, and animals. They would also hear their names from war captives at the torture stake, or on the road to the oven, or the butcher. But the chief way in which the new group names spread would be through captured women; for, though there might as yet be only a tendency towards exogamy, still girls of alien groups would be captured as mates. ‘We call you the Skunks,’ or whatever it might be, such a bride might remark, and so knowledge of the new group names would be diffused. These names would adhere to groups, on my hypothesis, already exogamous in tendency, and, when the totem myth arose, the exogamy would be sanctioned by the totem tabu.[47] TOTEMIC AND OTHER GROUP NAMES--ENGLISH AND NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN