is Crane.  He must marry a woman of the Wolf, or Turtle, or Swan, or other name, and her children keep her family title, not his.  Thus, if a Crane man marries a Swan woman, the children are Swans, and none of them may marry a Swan; they must marry Turtles, Wolves, or what not, and their children, again, are Turtles, or Wolves.  Thus there is necessarily an eternal come and go of all the animal names known in a district.  As civilisation advances these rules grow obsolete.  People take their names from the father, as among ourselves.  Finally the dwellers in a given district, having become united into a local tribe, are apt to drop the various animal titles and to adopt, as the name of the whole tribe, the name of the chief, or of the predominating family.  Let us imagine a district of some twenty miles in which there are Crane, Wolf, Turtle, and Swan families.  Long residence together, and common interests, have welded them into a local tribe.  The chief is of the Wolf family, and the tribe, sinking family differences and family names, calls itself ‘the Wolves.’  Such tribes were probably, in the beginning, the inhabitants of the various Egyptian towns which severally worshipped the wolf, or the sheep, or the crocodile, and abstained religiously (except on certain sacrificial occasions) from the flesh of the animal that gave them its name. {107}

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It has taken us long to reach the Sacred Mice of Greek religion, but we are now in a position to approach their august divinity.  We have seen that the sun-worship superseded, without abolishing, the tribal pacarissas in Peru, and that the huacas, or images, of the sacred animals were admitted under the roof of the temple of the Sun.  Now it is recognised that the temples of the Sminthian Apollo contained images of sacred mice among other animals, and our argument is that here, perhaps, we have another example of the Peruvian religious evolution.  Just as, in Peru, the tribes adored ‘vile and filthy’ animals, just as the solar worship of the Incas subordinated these, just as the huacas of the beasts remained in the temples of the Peruvian Sun; so, we believe, the tribes along the Mediterranean coasts had, at some very remote prehistoric period, their animal pacarissas; these were subordinated to the religion (to some extent solar) of Apollo; and the huacas, or animal idols, survived in Apollo’s temples.

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If this theory be correct, we shall probably find the mouse, for example, revered as a sacred animal in many places.  This would necessarily follow, if the marriage customs which we have described ever prevailed on Greek soil, and scattered the mouse-name far and wide. {108a} Traces of the Mouse families, and of adoration, if adoration there was of the mouse, would linger on in the following shapes:—­(1) Places would be named from mice, and mice would be actually held sacred in themselves. (2) The mouse-name would be given locally to the god who superseded the mouse. (3) The figure of the mouse would be associated with the god, and used as a badge, or a kind of crest, or local mark, in places where the mouse has been a venerated animal. (4) Finally, myths would be told to account for the sacredness of a creature so undignified.