Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/390



HE first two books on our list are a veritable triumph for folk-lore, and especially for that conception of the science which has been consistently advocated by the Folk-Lore Society. Here we have two books dealing with the primitive religion of the two great groups of nations from which civilisation has obtained its chief spiritual material, and both avowedly appeal to folk-lore for methods of investigation and for corroborative criteria. Both use freely the analogy of savage custom and ritual to explain those of Semites and Aryans. Both apply with confidence the method of “survivals”, in order to reconstruct the primitive systems from which the “survivals” derive. The two books deal with the deepest problems of human thought, and neither disdain, in seeking for their solution, the light that may be obtained from folk-tales, superstitions, and even games, those seemingly trivial remnants of older ways of thinking which folk-lore collects or investigates. As some justification for claiming the works of Prof. Smith and Mr. Frazer for our science, I think it would be generally admitted that there is no English specialist