Sir J. G. Frazer, after very candidly relinquishing two early suggestions—by no means fanciful—concerning the origin of Totemism, as unsupported by sufficient evidence, has put forward a third—“conceptional Totemism”—which occurred to him upon the discovery by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen of the doctrine of totemic descent prevalent amongst the Arunta and allied tribes. These tribes are said not to be aware of the connexion between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. They say that a child is the result of the entry into a woman of the spirit of some pre-existing tribesman of this or that Totem; which, therefore, will also be the child’s. What Totem it is depends upon the place where the woman first becomes aware of quickening; for there are certain places known to the natives where the people of such or such a Totem “went into the ground” [perhaps were buried]; and in passing such a place any woman is liable to be impregnated by one of the discarnate spirits; who are always on the look-out for an opportunity to re-enter the mortal state. This is the real cause of pregnancy, for which marriage is merely a preparation.[520] A young woman who does not desire the dignity of a matron, when passing such haunted ground, runs crouching by, and cries out that she is an old woman; for facility in being deceived is a saving grace of spirits. In modified forms this doctrine of “no paternity and re-incarnation” is professed by tribes throughout the centre and north of the continent, in Queensland and in parts of West Australia.[521] The Arunta doctrine of conception by animal or plant spirits cannot, however, be the origin of Totemism; because, as Sir James Frazer points out, the impregnating spirits are already totemic. One must, therefore, suppose (he says) an earlier state of things, in which a woman, ignorant of the true causes of childbirth, imagined at the first symptoms of pregnancy (by which the quickening seems to be meant) that she had been entered by some object, or by the spirit of some object, which had been engaging her attention at the time, or which she may have been eating—a wallaby, emu, plum or grass-seed—and later believed that the child she bare must be, or be an incarnation of, that object or spirit, and in fact nothing else than a wallaby, emu, plum or grass-seed with the appearance of a human being. If other women had similar experiences in connexion with other animals or plants, and if the descendants of their children remembered the stories, and considered themselves to be wallabies, grass-seed and so forth, the hypothesis would fully explain that identification of groups of men with groups of things which is characteristic of Totemism; and the other characters naturally follow. Such is the conceptional theory of Totemism, deriving that institution from “the sick fancies of pregnant women.”[522]