Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/254

 230 Reviews.

tribes also, the profession requires rigorous training and some- thing like an entrance examination. In some places it may be said to form a guild. The priest appears to combine the know- ledge of herbs (which is sometimes a speciality of the i?iyanga yemiti) with the ecstatic frenzy of the isattusi. He goes through a three years' apprenticeship, and then enters the corporation to which all the priests in the country belong. In Count Gotzen's Durch Afrika von Ost nach West there is an interesting account of a medical guild in Usumbwa.

There are many other points in this most interesting book which we should like to examine in detail, did space permit. But, as already implied, valuable as it is to the ethnographer, it should be still more valuable to the practical politician.

A. Werner.

Suggestion und Hypnotismus in der Volkerpsychologie. Von Dr. Med. Otto StoU. Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, Veit & Co., 1904. Pp. X, 738. Price 16 M.

It is one of the functions of the science of religions to discuss and determine how religion arose, but with the validity of the basis on which a religion is founded the scientific inquirer, as such, has nothing to do. ^^'hile therefore we may legitimately examine how far hallucinations and other phenomena, conveniently grouped togeth ^r under the term psychical, have had a share in the genesis of religion, it is not the business of anthropology to discuss how far such phenomena can be made to fit into any purely material- istic scheme of the universe. On the other hand, materialistic theories of psychical phenomena are equally uncalled for.

Dr. StoU sets out with the conception, derived from the con- templation of the psychical processes of the individual and of the history of mankind in the mass, of a purely mechanical determin- ism, but as in this work before us he is concerned to suggest rational explanations of magical practice and belief, of religion and superstition, and of the psychical phenomena of mankind as dis- played in history, he has embraced in his field of investigation