Note 8 — Chapter III

On the other hand, among the Mohegans, I can admit that Little Turtle, Mud Turtle, and Great Turtle may be deliberate subdivisions of the Turtle totem, now a phratry, but even this need not necessarily be the case; the different species of turtles being quite capable of giving names to different totems. I would not deny the possibility of the occasional segmentation of a totem group—far from it—but I doubt whether great tribes originally (and, as it seems, deliberately) first bisected themselves, and then cut up the two main divisions.