followed
upon the exogamy produced by hostile capture of women, and two streams
of influence would thus tell in favour of the evolution of a system of
formal exogamy, and Dr. Westermarck's theory of a natural avoidance of
housemates, with all its wealth of evidence, helps us at this point.

The position is not so clear as to totemism. If we begin, however,
with a clear understanding that it is not a part of the machinery of
exogamous grouping, but an independent growth of its own, we shall
have gained an important point, for the contrary opinion has very
often obscured the issue and prevented research in the right
direction.

It will be advisable to have before us the principal theories as to
the origin of totemism. There are practically three--Mr. Frazer's, Mr.
Lang's, and Mr. Baldwin Spencer's. Mr. Frazer considers totemism to be
"in its essence nothing more or less than an early theory of
conception, which presented itself to savage man at a time when he was
still ignorant of the true cause of the propagation of the species."
Mr. Frazer explains this theory further by saying that "naturally
enough, when she is first aware of the mysterious movement within her,
the mother fancies that something has that very moment passed into her
body, and it is equally natural that in her attempt to ascertain what
the thing is, she should fix upon some object that happened to be near
her, or to engage her attention at the critical moment."[356]

Mr. Lang rejects Mr. Frazer's theory _in toto_, and propounds his own
as due to the naming of savage societies, and to a sort of natural
exogamy produced by practically the same set of conditions as I have
already described. Mr. Lang's totemism began in the primary groups,
and began with exogamy as a necessary part of it. "Unessential to my
system," says Mr. Lang, "is the question how the groups got animal
names, as long as they got them, and did not remember how they got
them, and as long as the names according to their way of thinking
indicated an essential and mystic rapport between each group and its
name-giving animal. No more than these three things--a group animal
name of unknown origin; belief in a transcendental connection between
all bearers human and bestial of the same name; and belief in the
blood superstitions (the mystically sacred quality of the blood as
life)--was needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices
including exogamy," and further, "we guess that f