Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/108

 98 Reviews.

may throw some further light on an interesting chapter in the development of primitive music. He promises us a second part of his monograph, which will be devoted to the higher develop- ment of the musical bow, and to this we shall look forward with interest.

W. Crooke.

Marathi Proverbs. Collected and arranged by Rev. A. Manwaring, Missionary of the Church Missionary Society. Oxford: the Clarendon Press. 1899.

The hterature of India owes, as might have been expected, little to the Marathi genius. A race of small farmers and breeders of cattle, they display in their proverbs that limited view of life and a shrewd, often ill-natured, contempt for the weakling which finds its best utterance in the aphoristic philosophy of Mrs. Poyser. This rural wisdom finds its most fitting illustration in the incidents of a monotonous, squalid life, in the field and the dairy, the mean hut which shelters two or three generations, the wrangling of the mother-in-law with the child-wife, the contempt for the widow, the petty chaffering of the village market-place.

The compiler, I venture to think, has not quite realised the opportunities suggested by his wide knowledge of rural life. We have many collections of Hindu proverbs from many parts of India, and a fresh compilation including so many famihar friends is hardly needed. On the other hand, it would have been an in- teresting sociological study to discuss the wisdom of the Marathas from a comparative point of view, to select those maxims which really are characteristic of the race, and to show how they stand in relation to the the rural philosophy of the Panjabi or Bengali.

The folktales which he gives are, as a rule, jejune and com- monplace ; most of them are dull apologues obviously invented to point the moral of the proverb. Among the best I may note No. no, the story of the buffalo which gets its head stuck in a jar and the wise man can suggest no means of relief save by de- molishing the house of the unfortunate owner of the beast. In No. 232 we have the crocodile which tries to lure the jackal