Note 17 — Chapter VI

I am sure to be told that in Chapter III. I declared local totem groups to be the result of reckoning in the male line, and not primitive, and that, here, I make the primitive animal-named group local. My reply is that in this passage I am not speaking of totem groups, but of local groups bearing animal names, a very different thing. A group may have borne an animal name long before it evolved totemic beliefs about the animal, and recognised it as a totem. No group that was not local could get a name to itself, at this early stage of the proceedings. The "local habitation" precedes the "name."