Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/248

 2 24 Reviews.

the Peninsula, where the invaders, except perhaps the first Indo- Aryans, brought few women with them, and took women of the country to wife. Tribes and castes are subdivided into end- ogamous, exogamous, and hypergamous groups. Of the exoga- mous groups many are totemistic, and both totemism and exogamy may be traced to the general law of natural selection. The Indian theory of caste was probably derived from Persia. Its origin is an insoluble problem, but the chief factors of influence are pro- bably the correspondence between certain caste gradations and variations of physical type ; the development of mixed races from stocks of different colour ; lastly, the influence of fiction.

These results may, of course, be modified by the special ethno- graphical survey now in progress. Meanwhile the present report may be accepted as furnishing a compendium of valuable informa- tion on a most tangled problem of ethnology and sociology. In the third volume will be found a collection of monographs on the more interesting tribes and castes, which have formed the material on which the general survey has been prepared. Some of these have previously been printed, but others supply new and valuable material.

W. Crooke.

The Essential Kafir. By Dudley Kidd. With loo full- page illustrations from photographs by the Author. London : A. & C. Black. 1904. Pp. XV.. 436. Price i8s. net.

If the study of anthropology can be popularised in England by the issue of works whose superb illustrations alone would make the book interesting to every lover of art, Mr. Dudley Kidd deserves well of the Cinderella of sciences. Not only has he produced a work illustrated in a way that one only expects in official publications, where cost is only a secondary consideration (for examples of which we have to look beyond the shores of England), but he has accompanied it by a text which is popular in the best sense of the word. It is a lifelike character-sketch of our black fellow-subjects, based, as all such works, if they are to be successful, should be based, on long personal experience.