Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/489

 REVIEWS.

West African Studies. By Mary H. Kingsley. London : Macmillan & Co., Limited. 1899.

In her former work {Travels in West Africa, reviewed in Folk- Lore, vol. viii., p. 162) Miss Kingsley promised a further study of Fetish. In the present volume is included, beside much else of interest rather more directly to the politician and the merchant than to the anthropologist, a portion of the material she had reserved either for want of space or for additional inquiry. That it is written in the same amusing style as the former volume will attract many to read it who would perhaps otherwise never trouble themselves about the mysteries of Negro and Bantu metaphysics. And if there be any who are repelled by the enormity of treating such solemn subjects in humorous phraseology, they will soon learn that the smiles are the mask of knowledge, itself the result of accurate scientific observation and study. The following re- marks are confined to the chapters bearing on folklore studies. After defining Fetish as the religion of the West Africans, and defending her right to use the word in that sense. Miss Kingsley inquires what Fetish is, characterising it as a logical interpretation of Nature from the African point of view. "To the African there is perhaps no gap between the conception of spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair of grade — not of essential differ- ence in essence. At the head of existence are those beings who can work without using matter, either as a constant associate or as an occasional tool— do it all themselves, as an African would say. Beneath this grade there are many grades of spirits, who occa- sionally or habitually, as in the case of the human grade, are associated with matter, and at the lower end of the scale is what we call matter, but which I believe the West African regards as the same sort of stuff as the rest, only very low — so low that practically it doesn't matter ; but it is spirits, the things that cause