[523] See below, chapter ix of this book.
[524] Yet according to one passage in Mathews, the individual totem is hereditary among the Wotjobaluk. "Each individual," he says, "claims some animal, plant or inanimate object as his special and personal totem, which he inherits from his mother" (Journ. and Proc. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 291). But it is evident that if all the children in the same family had the personal totem of their mother, neither they nor she would really have personal totems at all. Mathews probably means to say that each individual chooses his individual totem from the list of things attributed to the clan of his mother. In fact, we shall see that each clan has its individual totems which are its exclusive property; the members of the other clans cannot make use of them. In this sense, birth determines the personal totem to a certain extent, but to a certain extent only.
[525] Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania, in Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, I, p. 238.
[526] See Dorsey, Siouan Cults, XIth Rep., p. 507; Catlin, op. cit., I, p. 37; Miss Fletcher, The Import of the Totem, in Smithsonian Rep. for 1897, p. 580; Teit, The Thompson Indians, pp. 317-320; Hill Tout, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 144.
[527] But some examples are found. The Kurnai magicians see their personal totems revealed to them in dreams (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 387; On Australian Medicine Men, in J.A.I., XVI, p. 34). The men of Cape Bedford believe that when an old man dreams of something during the night, this thing is the personal totem of the first person he meets the next day (W. E. Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, p. 19). But it is probable that only supplementary and accessory totems are acquired in this way; for in this same tribe another process is used at the moment of initiation, as we said in the text.
[528] In certain tribes of which Roth speaks (ibid.); also in certain tribes near to Maryborough (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 147).
[529] Among the Wiradjuri (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 406; On Australian Medicine Men, in J.A.I., XVI, p. 50).
[530] Roth, loc. cit.
[531] Haddon, Head Hunters, pp. 193 ff.
[532] Among the Wiradjuri (same references as above, n. 4).