which their own performance is clearly an imitation."
The Emu men have their own ceremonies, equally elaborate and quite as well adapted to promote the multiplication of emus as those of the witchetty-grub men to produce an abundance of witchetty grubs. The earnestness which is thrown into these ceremonies is beyond all question; and it seems to be clear that each totemic group in turn takes up its own burden of social responsibility: each has its duty to the tribe as a whole, and performs it to the best of its ability. Through their united efforts, as they firmly believe, the various processes of Nature are maintained in satisfactory activity; the succulent grub comes forth in due season and in reasonable quantity; the emu, the kangaroo, the bandicoot, and other useful animals keep up their numbers and continue to furnish food for the community; the hakea flower and the manna of the mulga tree grow in normal abundance; the winds blow; the streams flow; the clouds yield rain and the sun goes on shining by day and the stars by night, with, on the whole, an admirable regularity. A more satisfactory system it would really be difficult to conceive. How absurd, not to say profane, it would be for any one to suggest that ceremonies which were so abundantly justified by results might without danger be omitted! Skepticism is indeed very much out of place in certain stages of human development.
The interesting feature, however, as Mr. Frazer holds, in the descriptions given by the two Australian writers we have named is the proof they afford that totemism, instead of being an irrational, unexplainable aberration of the nascent intellect of man, was really a scheme for securing the greatest possible multiplicity of benefits for the savage community. The whole tribe was divided into groups, and each group undertook to look after some function of Nature and keep it up to the mark. Here was a notable step in the direction of division of labor. How it came about that the particular animal or plant which was the totem of a group became wholly or partially taboo to the group is not very easily explained; but it seems not impossible that some sense of tribal duty, gradually developed, kept those who were credited with providing any particular food element from being themselves greedy consumers of it. So far as that article was concerned they may have felt themselves as sustaining somewhat the character of hosts or entertainers of the tribe, and it may thus have became the custom that they should either not partake at all of that special thing, or partake of it only sparingly. If so, we find the foundations already laid both of politeness and of morality. It is an interesting question how far the notions which have been described have died out of modern civilized society. That they are wholly extinct it would be rash to affirm. There are many traces, indeed, of the surviving influence of symbolism, and here and there lingering tendencies toward a belief in magic are easily discoverable. Perhaps the wisest of us may learn to understand ourselves a little better by studying the operations of the human mind in its very earliest stages, before reason had yet shaken itself free from the random suggestions of sense.
THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY AND SCIENCE.
Apropos of the recent notable issue, by the Boston Public Library, of a comprehensive Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of Europe, to accompany Professor Ripley's Races of Europe, the twofold and diversely opposed interests of a great institution of this sort are called to mind. On the one hand are its manifold obligations to the great
