Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/365

 REVIEWS.

the publication of this important and interesting work Mr. Abercromby has done much to remove one of the reproaches of English scholarship. It is the first serious attempt that has been made in this country to investigate the early history and culture of the Finnish people. Such a task demands indeed no light equipment, as a glance at Mr. Abercromby's list of authorities will at once convince anybody; and it requires also a more than usually cautious habit of mind, for not only is the subject obscure in itself, but it is made still darker by the existence of vague hypotheses and unscientific conjectures. A proof of Mr. Abercromby's sound judgment is shown by his refraining from any excursions into the fascinating but at present unanswerable questions which centre round the Asiatic origin of the Finns. There are only two passages, I think, which refer to this point at all. In the first (vol. i. p. 86) the author says "that both stocks" (long-headed and short-headed) "originally issued from Asia seems almost certain;" and in the second passage (vol. i. p. 146) he remarks, "Though we have to believe that once the remotest ancestors of the Finnish peoples lived in Asia, it is, I think, impossible to trace them there." This reserve is the only scientific attitude. Might it not have been as well, however, to put the general reader on his guard against the errors and exaggerations with which this question has been treated in such books, for instance, as Lenormant's Chaldæan Magic?

In the first five chapters of Mr. Abercromby's first volume he tries, with the combined aid of craniology, archaeology, ethnography, and philology, to sketch the history of the Eastern and