ANCIENT HEBREW VILLAGE NAMES In Robertson Smith’s _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_ (p. 219) he says: ‘I have argued that many place-names formed from the names of animals are also to be regarded as having been originally taken from the totem clans that inhabited them.’ Now where totemism is a living institution I know no instance in which a locality is named from ‘the totem clan that inhabits it.’ The thing cannot be where female descent prevails, as many totems are then everywhere mixed in each local group. Where male descent prevails we do, indeed, get localities inhabited by groups mainly of the same totem name. But their tendency is to let the totem name merge in the territorial title, the name of the locality, as Messrs. Spencer and Gillen prove for the Arunta and Mr. Dorsey for the Sioux. Having found no instance where a totemic group gives its totem name to the locality which it inhabits, I was struck by a remark of Dean Stanley in his _Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church_ (p. 319, 1870). He there mentions the villages of Judah which were the scenes of some of Samson’s adventures (Joshua xv. 32, 33; Judges i. 35). The villages of Lebaoth, Shaalbim, Zorah, respectively mean Lions, Jackals, and Hornets. Nobody eats any of these three animals, and they may be names of totem groups transferred to localities--though of this usage I know no example among savage totemists--or they may merely be old Hebrew village sobriquets, as in England and France. On consulting the _Encyclopædia Biblica_, under ‘Names’ (vol. iii. 3308, 3316) we find that ‘there can be no doubt that many place-names’ in Palestine ‘are identical with names of animals.’ Those ‘applied to towns’ (we may read villages probably) are much more common in the south than in the north. We have Stags, Lions, Leopards, Gazelles, Wild Asses, Foxes, Hyænas, Cows, Lizards, Hornets, Scorpions, Serpents, and so on. These may have been derived from old totem kins, though I think that theory improbable, or from the frequency of hornets or scorpions in this or that place, or the villagers’ sobriquet may have become the village name. The last hypothesis has hitherto been overlooked. The frequency of animal and plant names in the Roman _gentes_, Fabii (Beans), Asinii (Asses), Caninii (Dogs), is an instance that readily occurs. These may be survivals of totemism or of less archaic sobriquets, while the totem names themselves, as we have argued, may have had their origin in sobriquets. [Footnote 1: _Western Antiquary_, vol. ix., pt. ii., p. 37, August, 1899.] APPENDIX B THE BA RONGA TERMS OF RELATIONSHIP