Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/201

 Reviews. 191

interesting are those of the False Faces. They are intended to appease certain evil spirits lurking in the rocks and hollow trees and to counteract their malign influences. These spirits appear to consist of horrible faces and to have power to inflict bodily ailments and to send diseases among the people. They are, in fact, the Flying Heads, well known to readers of Dorman and other writers on American superstitions. Mr, Boyle had great difficulty in ascertaining the existence of any such society among the Indians on the Reserve, though it was admitted that False Face (masked) dances took place. His perseverance, however, was at last rewarded, and he has been enabled to give a number of particulars about these societies and also two versions of the legend of their foundation. If the legend has been correctly transmitted from ancient times it is clear that not only is Rawen Niyoh, the Creator, not supreme, but that Ak'onwarah, the False Face, is his equal in power, and that neither the latter nor the other two False Faces (who are called his brother and his cousin) were made by the Creator.

The author has something also to say concerning other customs of the pagan Iroquois on the Reserve, their dress, dwellings, and sanitary condition ; he relates several of their legends ; he has procured the music of their ritual songs ; he discusses the effect of a mixture of blood upon the character and physical features of he half-breeds ; and he gives a number of portraits, beautifully reproduced from photographs, of Indians of pure and mixed blood, some of them in ceremonial costume, with views of their dwellings and other illustrations of their life on the Reserve, also sketches of their masks, diagrams, and the like. His Report thus forms an important record for purposes both of government and science. The museum of which he is the curator is a government institution of the Province of Ontario, and belongs to the Educa- tion Department. Under the administration of the Hon. Dr. Ross, as Minister of Education,^ it has been greatly developed. Such reports as this are a justification of Dr. Ross's enlightened policy, and are an example which, it is to be hoped, the mother- country will speedily follow in the ethnological department recently created in connection with the British Museum.

E. Sidney Hartland.

' Now (1900) Premier of Ontario.