Is it not more readily credible that, over a large extent of Thlinket country, many small local groups came, by an unconscious process (see ‘The Origin of Totemism’), to bear each a separate totem name? The two most important local groups, Raven and Wolf, would inevitably each contain, by the working of exogamy and female kin, members of all the other totems which would array themselves, five in each chief group, Raven and Wolf, as I have conjectured in speaking of the Australian cases.[8] Again, I cannot believe that a tribe like the Thlinkets originally had but two totems, not yet exogamous, then made them exogamous, and then cut them up, or let them split off, into many exogamous totem groups. No motive is obvious: the people, by the theory, being exogamous already. OBJECTIONS TO MR. FRAZER’S EARLY THEORY We shall later see that Messrs. Spencer and Gillen appear to advance, but also to qualify out of existence, a theory of a motive for an exogamous bisection of earlier non-exogamous local totem groups. They practically explain away their own explanation of--the great bisection, but it rests, while it exists, on certain recently discovered facts, which, in turn, are fatal, perhaps, to any theory that a tribe had originally but two totems, which became ‘phratries,’ on being subdivided into other totems. The new facts accepted and theorised on by Mr. Frazer and Mr. Spencer, would make it seem perhaps impossible that a tribe like the Thlinkets should originally have possessed but two ‘clans’ or totems. The facts, as stated by Mr. Spencer, in 1899, are these, or rather, this is his hypothesis founded on his facts. ‘In our Australian tribes the _primary_[9] function of a totem group is that of ensuring, by magic means, a supply of the object which gives its name to the totem group.’[10] Mr. Frazer says, ‘in its origin Totemism was, on our theory, simply an organised and co-operative system of magic.... Each totem group was charged with the superintendence and control of the particular department of nature from which it took its name....’[11] But this is hardly the origin of Totemism, so long as we are not told how, or why, each totem group took its name from a department of nature. Had it the name, before it worked magic for its eponymous object, or did it take the name because it worked the magic?