Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/396

 368 Reviews.

to the Shaikh AH Hamamush, who appealed to the king of the Jinn. The monarch ordered his follower to be crucified. When the girl's father passed the spot, he found what looked like a dark- green beetle hanging upon a splinter of wood. The weird tale of Shaikh Ahmad tells how he used to wander about at night. Once a disciple followed him, and suddenly found himself in an unknown land. He confessed his error, and his eyes were opened, and he found himself close beside the city from which he started. Another saint, Abu Bakr, would go to the mosque to say the Friday prayer, and leave a wolf in charge of his sheep and goats.

A blot on a book otherwise valuable is the eccentric trans- literation of the Arabic terms. Aisha stands for Ayesha. We have Muhammad and other names correctly transliterated side by side with Aboo Bekr ; Karaweeyeen for Karuiin, and so on.

W. Crooke.

Indian Folklore. By Ganeshji Jethabhal Limbdi, 1903.

This book, with its pretentious title and a statement on the title page that it is the first edition, seems to be an English trans- lation of a Gujarat! school book. For its original purpose it may be useful, but in its present form, with the additional drawbacks of bad English and worse printing, it is of Httle value. It purports to be a collection of Indian " legendary lore, which is particularly wide and varied, and presents us with a vivid picture of the actions, projects, thoughts, follies, and virtues of the human race.'' This the present sample certainly fails to provide. It consists of a series of short tales, some fairly witty and amusing. The author, however, violates all the canons of folktale collection. He gives no account of the manner in which he obtained the tales, by whom they were told, by whom they were collected. He gives no notes on custom, and, needless to say, no references to parallels. For scientific purposes the book is thus entirely value- less.

W. Crooke.