Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/287

 Greek Votive Offerings. 261

on the same shelf with Roscher's Ausfilhrlichcs Lexicon, or Overbeck's KunstmytJiologic, or other foreign authorities of equal calibre ? What handbooks have we like those of Welcker and Preller and Gruppe? What monographs comparable with Lobeck's Aglaophamtis, or Botticher's Baumkultus, or Otto Jahn's Baser Blick, or Maximilian Mayer's Giganten rtnd Titanen ? All this constitutes a very real reproach to English scholarship. But it is a reproach that the present generation of English scholars is doing its best to extinguish. The activity of the British Schools at Athens and at Rome, the increasingf recosfnition accorded to archaeology by our universities, the enthusiasm of the Hellenic Society, the publication of a whole series of antiquarian manuals by Messrs. Macmillan, these are a few out of many signs that scholars are at length awaking to the importance of classical archaeology and beginning to bestir themselves in earnest. At such a juncture it is not too much to say that the credit of our national scholarship is at stake ; and cordial thanks are due to those who in any department of the subject produce sound and scholarly work. That is what Dr. Rouse has done. He is indeed exceptionally well qualified to write on matters archaeolo- gical. He knows his monuments and museums ; he knows also his Teubner texts ; and he can thus draw upon both the sources of direct evidence, the monumental and the literary. But more than this, readers of Folk-Lore are aware that he has at his command the indirect evidence supplied by a study of survivals and of comparative religion. It was, therefore, only to be expected that his Greek Votive Offerings, the result of ten years' labour, would prove to be, what in fact it is, a thorough-going treatise of permanent value.

Dr. Rouse is further to be congratulated on having settled upon an untilled and almost untouched portion of the archaeological domain. Apart from a few dictionary articles and a couple of German programs, he had the field to him-