Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/102

 92 Reviews,

more it appears to be true), it will not much matter whether the savage lives on the banks of the Ganges or in the Torres Straits. In searching for the origin of religion, then, we do not exclude special studies of limited districts and limited times ; but we often find more help from " idiotic stories told by Digger Indians and Esquimaux." Without such comprehensive generalisations as we have spoken of, Sir Alfred himself could not have felt that the intellectual attitude of the savage was like "the animistic tendency of civilised men to treat a ship or a steam engine as a living creature." Even this analogy, unsound as it is — for the civilised man is only playing at such a belief — occurs to Sir Alfred only because folklorists have cleared the way. He bases his own generalisation on the science whose methods he has condemned. We will allow, then, that Sir Alfred Lyall has made some good points against certain applications of the science of folklore. We enjoy his pleasant bit of fooling which identifies St. Denis with Dionysius the Areopagite and Dionysus the wine-god, and his good-humoured chaff of Miss Kingsley's fishes and happy-go- luckihood. But we do not find that he has touched the fortress. He really attacks the abuse, not the use, of a scientific method in folklore ; and he shows that he has no real understanding of what that method is.

L'Annee Sociologique, publiee sous la direction de Emile DuRKHEiM, Professeur de Sociologie a la Faculte des Lettres de rUniversite de Bordeaux. Deuxieme Annee (189 7-1 898). Paris: Felix Alcan. 1899.

The first volume of this annual was noticed last year [Folk-Lore, vol. ix., p. 251), and to that notice I must refer for a general state- ment of its objects and character. The present volume fully maintains the high standard set up by M. Durkheim and his col- laborators. The two essays which precede the analyses of the year's publications are, the first by M. Durkheim himself on the definition of religious phenomena, and the second by Messrs. Hubert and Mauss on the nature and functions of sacrifice.