Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/219

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followed the Avis fidelie of 1673, the Histoire tres Veritable of 1697, the Marechal de Luxembourg au lit de la mort, 1695, and the Volksbuch of 1680, containing the account of the marshal's pact with the Devil.

The author's industry appears to have missed the interesting parallels of Claverse, and Dalzell (German savants are almost in- variably ill-informed and poorly read in the English literature of their subject), but it is difficult to be quite sure of omissions in the absence of an index. The bibliography is excellent in plan, and seems to be complete and correct.

All such late legends of which the origin and circumstances can be traced are of importance to folklore students as illustrating the growth of folk-sagas, and there are few monographs of the kind either so full, so careful, and so valuable as the one before us.

It is certainly one of the best studies of the kind that Germany has produced of late years, and worthy of a place in every work- ing folklore student's library.

F. York Powell.

Im Kampfe um Babel und Bibel. Ein Wort zur Verstandigung und zur Abwehr von A. Jeremias. 3rd enlarged edition. Leipzig: Hinrichs. 1903.

Dr. Jeremias, one of the most eminent among the younger Assy- riological scholars of Germany, is, as known to English readers of his Babylonian Conceptioti of Heaven and Hell, a recognised authority in the field of Babylonian mythology. The present pamphlet, which discusses, for the most part in a temperate and scholarly spirit, the questions raised by Fried. Delitzsch's sensa- tional and (in the bad sense of the word) popular exposition of the import of Assyriological research for Biblical history and theology, would not concern Folk-Lore save that Dr. Jeremias raises, casually and slightly though it be, two questions of the highest importance to the folklorist who strives to form a general conception of his study and to utilise its facts in determining the main lines and tracing the salient features of man's development. It is good from time to time to test those "first principles" which consciously or unconsciously influence our methods of investiga-