ABSTRACT
P r o f e s s o r Sir James Frazer considers that all tribes have developed their religious ideas, Totems and Totemic ceremonies from their own surroundings, and that those that practise magic represent a lower intellectual status : he thinks that magic preceded religion. I do not share this view. I believe that magic is very late in comparison with religious ideas, probably by many thousand years, and that we do not meet with this evolution until the time of the Nilotic Negro; even amongst the primitive tribes of these it is questionable if it is practised by them ; certainly none of the pre-totemic races practise it, except when they have adopted it by intercourse with the Nilotic Negroes.
