This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1887 edition. Excerpt: ... English the spelling totem (Keating, James, Schoolcraft,1 &c.) has become established by custom. The connexion between a man and his totem is mutually beneficent; the totem protects the man, and the man shows his respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it be an animal, and not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant. As distinguished from a fetich, a totem is never an isolated individual, but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or of plants, more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class of artificial objects. Considered in relation to men, totems are of at least three kinds: --(1) the clan totem, common to a whole clan, and passing by inheritance from generation to generation; (2) the sex totem, common either to all the males or to all the females of a tribe, to the exclusion in either case of the other sex; (3) the individual totem, belonging to a single individual and not passing to his descendants. Other kinds of totems exist and will be noticed, but they may perhaps be regarded as varieties of the clan totem. The latter is by far the most important of all; and where we speak of totems or totemism without qualification, the reference is always to the clan totem. T/ie Clan Totem.--The clan totem is reverenced by a body of men and women who call themselves by the name of the totem, believe themselves to be of one blood, descendants of a common ancestor, and are bound together by common obligations to each other and by a common 1 Expedition to Itasca Lake, New York, 1834, p. 146, &c. Petitot spells it todem in his Monographie des Dene-Dindjil, p. 40; but he writes oUmisme in his Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-ouest, p. 446. faith in the totem. Totemismis thus both a..
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