Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/533

Rh do not amount to absolute proof, they certainly afford a presumption in its favour which we may look to further research to confirm. Learned, penetrating, and clear, M. Durkheim's criticisms are always valuable; and they have done much to solve the difficulties raised by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's important volumes.

The reviews of books, which form the bulk of L'Année Sociologique, do not call for any remark, except that they fully sustain their usual high level. The careful articles on the fifth volume of the Report of the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits are an example.

In this collection of articles contributed by him during the last dozen years to the Revue Celtique, L'Anthropologie and other learned periodicals, M. Reinach touches upon nearly every point that can interest the anthropologist and the student of European religion, and handles all with the like mastery, the like penetrating grasp of essentials, the like power of lucid and orderly exposition. Totemism, Taboos, Marriage customs, Sacrifice, Magic, the Early Celtic Pantheon, Prayers for the Dead, the Infernal Cohorts, Byzantine Christianity, Apostolic Apocrypha, Mediæval Jewish Rationalism, Seventeenth-century Mysticism, such are his subjects, treated with full command of the pertinent literature, with full perception of the problems involved. Many of them belong to what is most obscure and controverted in our studies, and it is delightful to note the ease and sureness with which the complicated tangles of fact which confront the investigators of totemism, or of archaic sexual relations, are deftly woven into a simple and convincing argument. M. Reinach combines the eminently French quality of logical analysis with a truly German range of erudition and subtlety of method. Moreover, and this should commend his book to English students, he avows himself