Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/391

 Rh journal in which they could be more appropriately reviewed than in. Would that the suitability of the review were matched by the capacity of the reviewer!

Of the two books, we may deal with Prof. Smith’s first, as it appeared earlier, and is, perhaps, the more important. Though professedly dealing with the Religion of the Semites, it is mainly concerned with a hypothetical history of the ritual practices of the early Arabs in their relations to those of the Old Testament. Assyriological evidence is rejected as of too advanced and hieratic a character to throw light on origins. The evidence relating to Phœnicians and Syrians is too scanty and precarious to be of much value, though Prof. Smith refers to it now and again. So that, practically, all we have to go upon for the religion of the Semites is provided by the Old Testament and the traditions of Arabia in the times of ignorance before Mahomet. With regard to the latter, the evidence is very late, being mainly derived from the songs and anecdotes of pre-Islamite Arabs contained in the Hamasa and the Kitab Al Aghani. To these are added a few notices in the commentators and geographers, as well as those contained in classical sources. One of the latter, indeed, an account of the habits of the Sinaitic Arabsjn the fourth century A.D. by Nilus, does Prof. Smith yeoman’s service, as we shall see.

It is thus obvious, by a recital of Prof. Smith’s sources, that he adopts fully one of the main principles of the anthropological method. He seeks for origins among the primitive conditions of savage or quasi-savage life, and does not go on the assumption that the earlier in date is necessarily the earlier in development His implicit assumption throughout his book is, that the practices of the nomad Arabs, even though recorded much later, are more primitive and nearer the common source than the customs of the sessile and more civilised Hebrews. It need scarcely be said that such an assumption will meet with no demurrer in the pages of or from any