At the very dawn of human history we find all over the world, in Europe, India, China and America, the ancient peoples keeping four great festivals as a rule, at the summer and winter solstices and the two equinoxes; in fact their religious culture in cardinal points was one and the same. One part of the faith of these ancient Ivernians and Celts that has lingered on to our own times is the deeply cherished belief in Fairies. How this belief came to be so widely spread and deeply cherished amongst ancient peoples it is impossible to say. It has been suggested that, in their wanderings over the world in search of pasturage and congenial climate, they may have encountered in the recesses of primeval forests or in lonely fastnesses of the mountains remnants of the slowly vanishing pigmy race of neo-lithic cave men, and that they came to regard them with something of superstitious awe, and that the memory of these "little people" became a race memory, in the course of generations becoming etherealised and woven into the woof of their religious beliefs. On the other hand we have the possible view that our nomadic forefathers may have had fitful glimpses, as some of their descendants aver they have, of orders of beings beyond the ken of normal human vision, of beings existing upon another plane. Taking into consideration the exceeding aboundingness of human life within the radius of our poor faculties, I confess that this view seems to present no inherent difficulty. Possibly in the way in which the people of each Cornish Parish possessed in former generations a nickname, we have a vestige of still more ancient rights, which carry us back to the very dawn of human culture. We have Wendron goats, Mullion gulls, Madron bulls, St. Agnes cuckoos, Mawgan owls, St. Keverne buccas[5] and many others. The following old rhyme perpetuates the fading memory of the custom, "Cambourne men are bull dogs, Breage men are brags, Germoe men can scat 'un all to rags." An analogous custom to this Cornish system of nicknames prevails amongst primitive people all the world over.[6] Each tribe or section of the tribe has its Totem, an animal, bird or plant, with which it is supposed to be in close and intimate relationship, and from which the tribe or section of a tribe receives its name. Possibly Totemism may have had its origin in crude attempts of primitive men to prevent too close intermarriage, as men and women possessing the same Totem were not allowed to marry, whilst on the other hand it has been suggested that the custom was bound up with the view of primitive men with regard to sacrifice and inter-communion with their Gods.