Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/277

 Reviews. 239

us to dispense with the latter. I have no space to adduce the careful and elaborate discussions by the authors of various points in connection with the rites and traditions they record. It must sufifice to say that their conclusions are always cautious, and while they may not in every detail be finally accepted by students, they are at all events to be regarded with the deference due to in- vestigators who speak with an adequate sense of responsibility, and after the most painstaking inquiries ; nor are they conclusions to be lightly set aside. I heartily join with reviewers elsewhere in expressing the gratitude of anthropologists for a vvork which must for a long while rank among those of the first importance for the study of savage races.

E. Sidney Hartland.

Gypsy Folk-Tales. By Francis Hindes Groome. Demy 8vo. London : Hurst and Blackett. 1899.

A VOLUME which contains seventy-six tales for the most part translated out of tongues not commonly understood by English- men, comprising, moreover, twenty-five collected within the British Isles, several of which appear in print for the first time, cannot but be welcome to folklorists. And although Mr. Groome dis- claims being a folklorist, the notes he has added to the tales show a command of vidrchen literature which could not easily be surpassed. The chief interest of his book lies, however, in the introduction, which is not only a storehouse of recondite facts and ingenious surmises, but a remarkable piece of literature in- vested with the indefinable charm which pertains to all his writing, a charm akin to that which surrounds the strange race which he knows better than any living man. In it he propounds afresh the theory of Gypsy origin and dissemination of European folk-tales, and recapitulates it thus: "The Gypsies quitted India at an unknown date, probably taking with them some scores of Indian folk-tales, as they certainly took with them many hundreds of Indian words. By way of Persia and Armenia, they arrived in the Greek-speaking Balkan peninsula, and tarried there for several centuries, probably disseminating their Indian folk-tales, and themselves picking up Greek folk-tales, as they certainly gave