rate totemism at its beginning from totemism in
its most advanced stages. Totemism has not come to man fully equipped
in all its parts. It is like every other human institution, the result
of a long process of development, and the various stages of
development are important parts of the evidence as to origins. At the
beginning, it was clearly not connected with blood kinship and
descent; it was as clearly not connected with any class system of
marriage. But its beginnings would allow of these later growths, would
perhaps almost engender these later growths.

Thus, the primary notion of the totem birth of children would, when
blood kinship and descent became a consciously accepted element in
social development, easily slide into the belief of a totemic ancestor
and kinship with the totem; the protection and assistance afforded by
the totem to the women of the primary groups who became the mothers of
new generations, would easily grow into a sort of worship of the
totem; the adoption of the totem name from the circumstances of birth
implying the origin of the name from within the group and not from
without would, as aggregation took the place of segregation, give way
before the association of groups of persons with common interests; the
aggregate totem name would come to the separate local totems as soon
as, but not before, aggregation had taken the place of segregation in
the formation of the social system, and this was not at the earliest
stage; the close association of the totems with groups of mothers who
always took the fathers of their children from without the mother
group, would readily develop into differentiating the mother totems
within the group from the totems of the fathers without the group, and
this differentiation would produce a special relationship between the
sexes based upon the difference of totems instead of upon the sameness
of them; and finally there would be produced first a two-class
division founded on sex--all the mothers and all the fathers--and,
only in a developed form, a two-class division founded on the accepted
totem name.

If this is a probable view of the course of totemic evolution, we may
more confidently refer to its final stages for further evidence.
Advanced totemic society shows a constant tendency to substitute
blood kinship for the association with natural objects: first, blood
kinship with the mother, then with the mother and the father, finally
recognised through the father