Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/392

386 follower of Dr. Tylor. And equal welcome will be accorded to Prof. Smith’s practice in resorting for confirmatory evidence to savage nations among non-Semites; it would have been well, indeed, if he had had more frequent recourse to this class of evidence.

On the subject of sources, it is strange that Prof. Smith has not had more frequent recourse to the Talmud and kindred literature of the later Hebrews. Here, if anywhere, we should expect to find “survivals” of archaic custom; and much of Talmudic ritual carries on the face of it evidence of more archaic practice than the more ideal codes of Ezekiel and the Pentateuch. Prof. Smith rightly praises the works of Spencer and Selden in the seventeenth century, but he would have done well to have followed their example in using the Talmud. He would, besides, have been able by this means to test the current hypothesis of the sequence of the three codes into which the Pentateuch has been divided by the Dutch and German critics. If these point to a development in a certain direction, we ought to find that development carried still further in the same direction in Talmudic times. As a matter of fact, literary analysis is of little use in archaeological research, and is scarcely mentioned more than once or twice by Prof. Smith.

Another point in which Prof. Smith adopts the methods of the anthropological school, is, that he seeks for his origines in early practice rather than in early thought or theory. In other words, he looks for the religion of the primitive Semites in the ritual of Semites less primitive, and not in their creed, if indeed any ancient religion can be said to have a creed. Thus the present instalment of his work deals in the main with the ritual of Sacrifice, and its meaning among the primitive Semites; and the subject of Semitic mythology is left for the second series of the Burnett Lectures. Here again Prof. Smith is at one with Mr. Spencer, Dr. Tylor, Mr. Lang, and all those who have