Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/172

 150 the child-stealing witch from the heights of the Carpathian Mountains, through Roumania, the south of Russia, the Plains of the Balkans, as far as Old Byzantium, thence to the cloisters of Syria, through Palestine, and on to the Valley of the Nile. A far-travelled charm indeed, and who knows how far it will travel still?

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PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION.

BY R. R. MARETT, M.A.

(Read at Meeting of November 18th, 1899.)

object of the present paper is simply to try to give relatively definite shape to the conception of a certain very primitive phase of Religion, as Religion may for anthropological purposes be understood. The conception in question will strike many, I daresay, as familiar, nay possibly as commonplace to a degree. Even so, however, I venture to think that it is one amongst several of those almost tacitly accepted commonplaces of Comparative Religion which serve at present but to "crib, cabin, and confine" the field of active and critical research. Comparative Religion is still at the classificatory stage. Its genuine votaries are almost exclusively occupied in endeavouring to find "pigeon-holes" wherein to store with some approach to orderly and distinct arrangement the vast and chaotic piles of "slips" which their observation or reading has accumulated. Now in such a case the tendency is always to start with quite a few pigeon-holes, and but gradually and, as it were, grudgingly, to add to their number. On the other hand considerable division and sub-division of topics is desirable, both in the interest of specialised study and in order to baffle and neutralise the efforts of popularisers to enlist prejudice on the side of one or another