LITMIR.BIZ

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      (2) As to the particular animal or other object selected in order to give a name to the Tribe, this would no doubt be largely accidental. Any unusual incident might superstitiously precipitate a name. We can hardly imagine the Tribe scratching its congregated head in the deliberate effort to think out a suitable emblem for itself. That is not the way in which nicknames are invented in a school or anywhere else to-day. At the same time the heraldic appeal of a certain object of nature, animate or inanimate, would be deeply and widely felt. The strength of the lion, the fleetness of the deer, the food-value of a bear, the flight of a bird, the awful jaws of a crocodile, might easily mesmerize a whole tribe. Reinach points out, with great justice, that many tribes placed themselves under the protection of animals which were supposed (rightly or wrongly) to act as guides and augurs, foretelling the future. "Diodorus," he says, "distinctly states that the hawk, in Egypt, was venerated because it foretold the future." (Birds generally act as and Samoa the kangaroo, the crow and the owl premonish their fellow clansmen of events to come. At one time the Samoan warriors went so far as to rear owls for their prophetic qualities in war. (The jackal, or 'pathfinder'—whose tracks sometimes lead to the remains of a food-animal slain by a lion, and many birds and insects, have a value of this kind.) "The use of animal totems for purposes of augury is, in all likelihood, of great antiquity. Men must soon have realized that the senses of animals were acuter than their own; nor is it surprising that they should have expected their totems—that is to say, their natural allies—to forewarn them both of unsuspected dangers and of those provisions of nature, WELLS especially, which animals seem to scent by instinct." (1) And again, beyond all this, I have little doubt that there are subconscious affinities which unite certain tribes to certain animals or plants, affinities whose origin we cannot now trace, though they are very real—the same affinities that we recognize as existing between individual PERSONS and certain objects of nature. W. H. Hudson—himself in many respects having this deep and primitive relation to nature—speaks in a very interesting and autobiographical volume (2) of the extraordinary fascination exercised upon him as a boy, not only by a snake, but by certain trees, and especially by a particular flowering-plant "not more than a foot in height, with downy soft pale green leaves, and clusters of reddish blossoms, something like valerian." … "One of my sacred flowers," he calls it, and insists on the "inexplicable attraction" which it had for him. In various ways of this kind one can perceive how particular totems came to be selected by particular peoples.