Secondly, the observations of Dr. Rivers in the Banks Islands give not the slightest support to the conceptional hypothesis. For (_a_) the Banks Islands belief “is not accompanied by any ignorance of the physical rôle of the human father.” (_b_) The belief is that the child born to a woman who has been visited by a plant or animal is in some way “influenced” by the experience; not, as with the Arunta, that it is entirely due to it (except for some “preparation” by the father). (_c_) Before the Banks Islands belief can give rise to Totemism there must be a belief in the continuous inheritance of the plant or animal influence; and not only is this absent, but there is a strong tendency to prevent it. A woman having been influenced by an eel, her child is an eel; but if that child be a girl, there is no further transmission of eel-like qualities; the girl, on becoming pregnant, may be influenced by a yam, and then her child will be a yam. This hinders the formation of a group of human beings mysteriously allied to an animal or plant, such as Totemism implies. But (_d_) the conceptional hypothesis refers the origin of Totemism to the ignorant imaginings of women themselves, who think they have been entered by this or that; whereas in the Banks Islands a woman’s belief in the influence of an animal or plant upon her offspring is not prompted by her own fancy, but by a popular superstition. For when she carries the thing found in her loin-cloth to the village, “the people say” she will give birth to a child who will have the qualities of, or even will be that thing; and a child afterwards born may not eat or touch that thing “by the custom of the country.” Had the Arunta, then, of pre-totemic days such a superstition and custom for the guidance of mothers? If so, the history of that superstition and custom must be more obscure than Totemism itself. But in the Banks Islands their origin may admit of a wide solution; for although it is said that no manifest traces of Totemism are to be found there now; yet, seeing that the Australians, Papuans, Polynesians and the Melanesians to the north all have Totemism or plain vestiges of it, the improbability that Melanesians in the Banks Islands never had it is very great; and it is reasonable to suppose that the superstition concerning the influence of animals or plants upon pregnant women, and the taboo upon the eating of such an animal or plant by the offspring, represent not a possible origin of Totemism, but a survival of it.