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History had lost even the sense of shame. It was a hundred years behind the experimental sciences. For all serious purpose, it was less instructive than Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas. All this was without offence to Sir Henry Maine, Tyler, McLennan, Buckle, Auguste Comte, and the various philosophers who, from time to time, stirred the scandal, and made it more scandalous.
McLennan sets out, that totem-worship preceded the worship of anthropomorphic gods, is one to which I can yield but a qualified assent. It is true in a sense, but not wholly true.
As McLennan says in his "Studies in Ancient History," infanticide was formerly very common among the savages of New Zealand, and "it was generally perpetrated by the mother." He notes much the same state of affairs among the primitive Australians, except that abortion was also frequently employed.
McLennan gives but an indefinite answer to the essential question How did the worship of animals and plants arise? Indeed, in his concluding paper, he expressly leaves this problem unsolved; saying that his "is not an hypothesis explanatory of the origin of Totemism, be it remembered, but an hypothesis explanatory of the animal and plant worship of the ancient nations."
McLennan, Studies, p. 46. Similar traces are found in England: Canute, the Dane, when acknowledged King of England, married Emma, the widow of his predecessor, Ethelred. Ethelbald, King of Kent, married his stepmother, after the death of his father Ethelbert; and, as late as the ninth century, Ethelbald, King of the West Saxons, wedded Judith, the widow of his father.
One foundation that of promiscuity, on which Bachofen and McLennan, the two upholders of matriarchy, base their hypothesis has been overthrown. It thus becomes necessary to approach the question from an altogether different position. Mother-right must be explained without any reference to unregulated sexual conduct.
McLennan, the primitive group or horde, though originally without explicit consciousness of relationships, were yet held together by a feeling of kin. Such feeling would become conscious first between the mother and her children, and, in this way, mother-kin must have been realised at a very early period. Mr.
I apply the word totemism to the widely diffused savage institution which I have defined. More about Totems The origin of totemism is unknown to me, as to Mr. McLennan and Dr. Robertson Smith, but Mr. Max Muller knows this origin. 'All this applies in the first instance to Red Indians only. Yes, and 'clan' applies in the first instance to the Scottish clans only! When Mr.
Swinburne's acquaintance at that time. I was elected about this time a member of the Savile Club, which then had its home in Savile Row. My proposer was Mr. J. F. McLennan, the author of "Primitive Marriage," and I owed my immediate election chiefly to his good offices, but partly to the fact that my book on Charlotte Bronte had found favour with the reading public.
McLennan, in the very earliest of all writings on totemism, said: 'As the totem has not till now got itself mixed up with speculations the observers have been unbiassed. Mr. McLennan finally declined to admit any evidence as to the savage marriage laws collected after his own theory, and other theories born from it, had begun to bias observers of barbaric tribes.
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