Let us apply the explanation more widely.  Say that a hundred animal names are represented in the known totem-kindreds of the world.  Then had each such kin originally an eponymous hero whose name, like that of Areas in Arcady, accidentally ‘reminded’ his successors of a beast, so that a hundred beasts came to be claimed as ancestors?  Perhaps this was what occurred; the explanation, at all events, fits the wolf of the Delawares and the other ninety-nine as well as it fits the Arcades.  By a curious coincidence all the names of eponymous heroes chanced to remind people of beasts.  But whence come the names of eponymous heroes?  From their tribes, of course—­Ion from Ionians, Dorus from Dorians, and so on.  Therefore (in the hundred cases) the names of the tribes derive from names of animals.  Indeed, the names of totem-kins are the names of animals—­wolves, bears, cranes.  Mr. Max Muller remarks that the name ‘Arcades’ may come from [Greek], a bear (i. 738); so the Arcadians (Proselenoi, the oldest of races, ‘men before the moon’) may be—­Bears.  So, of course (in this case), they would necessarily be Bears before they invented Areas, an eponymous hero whose name is derived from the pre-existing tribal name.  His name, then, could not, before they invented it, remind them of a bear.  It was from their name [Greek] (Bears) that they developed his name Areas, as in all such cases of eponymous heroes.  I slightly incline to hold that this is exactly what occurred.  A bear-kin claimed descent from a bear, and later, developing an eponymous hero, Areas, regarded him as son of a bear.  Philologically ’it is possible;’ I say no more.

The Bear Dance

’The dances of the maidens called [Greek], would receive an easy interpretation.  They were Arkades, and why not [Greek] (bears)?’ And if [Greek], why not clad in bear-skins, and all the rest? (ii. 738).  This is our author’s explanation; it is also my own conjecture.  The Arcadians were bears, knew it, and possibly danced a bear dance, as Mandans or Nootkas dance a buffalo dance or a wolf dance.  But all such dances are not totemistic.  They have often other aims.  One only names such dances totemistic when performed by people who call themselves by the name of the animal represented, and claim descent from him.  Our author says genially, ’if anybody prefers to say that the arctos was something like a totem of the Arcadians . . . why not?’ But, if the arctos was a totem, that fact explains the Callisto story and Attic bear dance, while the philological theory—­Mr. Max Muller’s theory—­does not explain it.  What is oddest of all, Mr. Max Muller, as we have seen, says that the bear-dancing girls were ‘Arkades.’  Now we hear of no bear dances in Arcadia.  The dancers were Athenian girls.  This, indeed, is the point.  We have a bear Callisto (Artemis) in Arcady, where a folk etymology might explain it by stretching a point.  But no etymology will explain bear dances to Artemis in Attica.  So we find bears doubly connected with Artemis.  The Athenians were not Arcadians.